Archive for LinkedIn
… heroic serendipity
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Things have been a little slow on the writing front since my last post about Tim Armit’s essay.
I was a little disappointed that Tim’s original post generated so little discussion. I am the only person who commented at Continuity Central.
I also posted about this on a LinkedIn Group (BCM Info Exchange), which generated 3 comments. I guess the failed companies are the only ones who are not adopting an all hazards approach, everybody else seems to be doing it!
So here is a story about 2 super heroes of BC and the level of preparedness and pre-planning that underpins these heroic strategies.
Back in the dark days and months following the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks one of the computer companies (Citrix) mounted a world-wide road show highlighting how one of their customers had used the Citrix Presentation Server product to enable a very successful recovery after the attack.
Suddenly they had a new marketing angle, the product was offered as a solution for Business Continuity.
It was a good story and the client had truly thrived, despite being a major tenant of the World Trade Centre. However, and this bit was not widely promoted in the roadshow, the client was really only playing around with this technology for a different purpose when the attacks occurred - they had not installed it as a BC solution.
Top marks to the techo who realised the potential and this lucky client was able to scale their 25 user, minor remote access tool up to a 4,500 user BC solution in 6 weeks.
The client with the great BC story to tell, that was Lehman Brothers. You will have heard about them, unfortunately the Citrix BC solution did not save them from the Global Financial Crisis. I guess it was not an all hazards piece of software after all.
This is a nice segway into a contemporary hero of BC. Just prior to Lehman failing (in September 2008) a European entity, Euroclear Bank , conducted a major BC exercise around a scenario of a major multi-market institution failing. These guys deserve kudos for running such an exercise – and it was realistic and their top Executives participated. Two months after the exercise Lehman’s failed – and the learning and experience of the exercise helped the Euroclear team to ride out the storm effectively.
You may have read about how Euroclear applied the core principles of BCM to the financial crisis – not exactly true. But they do deserve some credit.
It is not legacy BC that really helped, it was good Crisis/Incident Management arrangements and having rehearsed the executive in these roles and situations. I doubt that a single BC Plan document would have been referenced in the entire process.
I have a number of finance sector clients who have undertaken exercises that go beyond the facilities and technology arena. Liquidity issues, market upheaval and systemic social failures make for good challenges for senior executives – but very few BCM people will promote or deliver these types of exercises. They require specialist (non-BC) support to prepare and they are an exercise of adaptive crisis management rather than recovery plans and alternate sites.
I still believe these clients are the exception not the rule. Most are not thinking or exercising these issues. As evidenced by Tim’s article, in the UK they will not need to address these issues in the future to pass regulatory scrutiny. Just protect themselves from risks that have rarely put any Bank out of business.
Maybe they will get lucky.
Do you only exercise/rehearse the traditional building/technology/people impacts?
… conversation silos
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One of the things I find annoying about these online conversations is how fragmented they often are – too many entities trying to own the conversation (competing blogs and web sites) and as a result we get limited people engaged. The most annoying are those that are locked away behind a login and those that do not allow syndication in some way.
I have a block in the left margin of each page where I highlight other blog posts that I have commented on (where they support that technology) in the hope of drawing other people to those conversations. Also in the right margin of this page is my Blogroll (the ones I read regularly), my bookmark feed from Delicious and some interesting stuff from Google Reader. Despite all this some valuable discussion s are still locked away.
Recently I have been engaged in some very interesting discussions on the LinkedIn Groups feature. These Groups exhibit both of my major annoyances. The subject has been around the people aspects of BC – or the lack of attention to this aspect by many people.
Here are the links to the Groups/Discussions. LinkedIn is free to join and both Groups have moderated membership so you need to wait for your request to join the Group to be approved. I encourage anybody interested in resilience thinking (or in fact in doing BC properly) to join and contribute – after all the people part of this is probably the most important.
The first conversation was started by Josh Eudowe, a person new to the BC field. It is posted in the Group BCMIX – BCM Info Exchange. Here is what he posted;
I’m a business continuity professional (relatively new to the industry) and I’d like to focus less on the facilities and more on the people. For example, work with clients on how to prepare employees for a crisis and to help management to design and implement programs to:
1. Identify how employees can/will be affected by all possible situations
2. Identify the possible responses from employees
3. Prepare a plan to ensure employee retention and effectiveness
4. Communicate to employees what’s being done, without causing concern
5. Implement training programs
6. Create an effective “employee continuity plan” and test for readiness
This thread currently has 35 comments – which is an amazing level of response. Responses to any thread are varied and different readers will get value from different posts. Often you pick up good links to other writing in the responses, such as Mike Jacobs paper published at Continuity Central. I have also added a couple of new LinkedIn contacts based on what they had to say.
I would really like to be able to share these debates with a wider audience but they do not have RSS feeds or any other way to share with a non-LinkedIn audience.
One of my contributions to this discussion was to raise the profile of a new LinkedIn Group – this one is called “Human Continuity“. At the time it only had 2 members and no activity – fortunately 3 new people joined from the first thread.
I made this post on the discussion board – as yet there is no debate;
Reading thru the two related threads it seems to me that we are often talking at cross purposes about what “people” mean in the context of Business Continuity.
You will see references to “Human Aspects” and “Human Infrastructure”. Reminds me of one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons where the Evil HR Director suggest we refer to them as ‘Human Cattle’.
Do these labels seek to dehumanise? Note the question is not do the specific people who used those labels seek this – but is the need for the labeling indicative of a model of thinking that requires it.
Is this a feature of the very mechanistic “BC is a system/process” thinking?
We also talk about people as plan content – the content of Call Trees, who must attend the Command Centre/Recovery Site, who must be trained in roles.
And as people who must be cared for after a catastrophic event, the welfare aspect.
If we are seeking to achieve the continuity of business operations – then people are extremely important. Planning is important – plans are simply artefacts.
If we write plans for people to read, and perhaps follow as an option if it makes sense in the incident they face, then the plans exist to serve the needs of the people – not the other way around.
Do you have a view on this subject – then I encourage you to join the group on LinkedIn and contribute. If not you are welcome to post here and I will write up a digest of the comments I get.
How do you view ‘people issues’ within BCM?
Are the people there to serve the plans, or is it the other way around?
