Archive for BCM
… synergy rather than convergence
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I have recently been included in a Working Party initiated by the Busines Continuity Institute in the UK. This Working Party has the label ‘Discipline Mapping’ – it will focus on how a range of different disciplines can contribute to the building and maintaining resilience.
A lot of the talk in this area has been around how various disciplines may/should converge going forward. In many of these discussions the idea seems to be that there will be a new ‘resilience’ discipline formed from this convergence of disciplines like BCM, Risk Management, Emergency Management, Crisis Management and others.
There is a link at the bottom of this post to some other articles of mine on the subject.
Resilience is a concept and something to aspire to – it is not a new discipline to be formalised, standardised and eventually bastardised (like many of these other areas have been). One of the aspects of this ‘Discipline Mapping’ initiative was that it sought to explore how resilience could be achieved by various disciplines working together, collaboration and synergy rather than the need for the streams to formally converge.
The Working Party started with a given definition of resilience and completing a survey to quickly capture the groups thoughts. The starting definition was;
“the ability to mitigate and recover faster from disruptive events”
Personally I did not like this definition, I find it too narrow. So did a number of others, so the definition is being reviewed. I will post more on this when the discussion paper comes out.
The initiative will explore the concepts of Corporate and Community Resilience and how a range of disciplines many contribute to this outcome. The aim is deliver some documented “Points of View” that may assist others to understand the skills, behaviours and challenges required to integrate these various disciplines to build resilience.
Looking forward to some great opportunities to discuss and debate these issues with the other folks in the Working Party. In particular I will be interested to see if the concepts are understood differently in other parts of the world. This interaction is the real value we can derive from membership of these professional organisations, not the certification and weighty tomes of standards/good practice guides.
I will just have to find some extra time for reading and responding to the material.
How do you see the way forward? Synergy and Collaboration or Convergence of disciplines?
References
… profession or not?
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Things have been fairly hectic since my return from Toronto. A new client engagement to get started, not to mention a number of late nights watching the FIFA World Cup, have distracted me from posting here.
While catching up on my reading I came across this article in Risk Magazine. The quoted comments are in response to the question “What do you think are the significant challenges facing the risk profession in Australia?”
“Our greatest challenge is that we are not really a profession and do not always behave as professionals.”
That was how Grant Purdy started his response. Grant is the Chair of the Standards Australia/New Zealand Committee on Risk Management. This is the group that led the production of AS4360, on which the bulk of ISO31000 is based. Take a look at his CV (linked below) and you will see that is a practitioner not just a theorist or bureaucrat.
He continues as follows …
“By way of contrast it would not, for example, be possible for me to practice as an accountant or an engineer without proper training and a universally recognised qualification … I would not trust the servicing of my car to an unqualified mechanic and yet many organisations trust their entire strategy for managing risk with someone who has never worked in that area before or who cannot, for example, describe a risk correctly …”
Not only is this often true for Risk Managers, but too often for BC Managers. No universally recognised qualification – but numerous competing certification bodies. No need for experience, rote learning and reciting the text in the exam will suffice.
A number of other observers in the area have made similar observations on the subject. I have included the links below.
- Nat Forbes provides an interesting litany of the various competing certifications in BC
- Trevor Levine talks about the same aspect in the RM field
- John Glenn takes the debate to a specific industry sector in his home in Florida.
Where we do require some degree of certification for a BC (or Risk) Manager, too often we find that these people are not doing the real work but tasking others. Lawyers and Accountants actually do the specific work of their profession, of course there are different levels and the heavy lifting is done by the junior folks. Too often in Risk and BC the heavy lifting is sent to be done by local ‘co-ordinators’ and other non-certified folks.
In particular John Glen’s post targets one of the central issues – are we talking ‘Risk Management’ or the management of risk?
Grant Purdy explains it this way …
“There is also one other, profound and associated challenge we face, that is concerned with , quite simply, how we describe ourselves and what we do. If we continue to describe what we do as risk management and ourselves as risk managers, then we will never advance our profession and enhance its standing. We must realise that we do not manage risk – that is the job of others. Our role is to help, assist and sometimes cajole them to manage risk more effectively.”
If we want to be professionals we first need a profession. Not just the single training and certification approach – but professionals actually doing the skilled work rather than oversight of frameworks and compliance processes.
Are we looking at this the wrong way?
Has BCM and RM become a governance and compliance profession?
Is the management of risk and continuity simply just another aspect of the practice/profession of management?
References/Links
Risk Magazine, June 2010, Issue 75
Grant Purdy – Broadleaf Capital International
John Glen Post on risk certifications
Trevor Levine, Riskczar post on certification
Nathaniel Forbes post on certification in BC
