Archive for Operational Risk
… 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
… a professional’s lament
Posted by: | CommentsI read a lot of BCM-related websites, and I am subscribed to too many mailing lists and RSS feeds on the subject. With a lot of the content I just hit the delete key. However when the name Tim Armit comes up on on any of these sources I sit up and pay attention.
Tim speaks his mind, and his opinions are based on considerable experience and good understanding of what this BCM game is really about.
This article from Tim on Continuity Central, entitled “Have we lost sight of the bigger picture” is a must read for everybody who has any interest in BCM. Just click through and read it please – come back and read the rest of this post later if you want.
I share Tim’s despair at the state of the art of BC. But I am not surprised by the situation he describes.
BCM is not currently about the continuity of operation of a business. It has become something else – more focussed on the management system and the certification of that system than the capability to deal with an incident and recover.
In other posts on this blog I have suggested that resilience may just be BCM done properly. Perhaps BCM is a lost cause (or a lost discipline) and we need something to replace it.
It also reminds me of Nathaniel Forbes recent lament about the lack of a career path in BCM. In many ways the problem is driven by the same processes and outcomes that are not valued by the business leadership.
Over at the DRJ Blogs I responded to a post and asserted that ‘resilience’ should address economic downturns. That position was rejected as not being the province of BCM. It is not surprising to me that Tim has BC Managers from failed companies telling him the same thing.
Sure Risk Management could be considered the ‘big picture’ discipline, but BC Planning is supposed to be a mitigation for residual risk. We have become too focussed on the historic risk approach of looking at probability more than impact. Even Risk Management has changed its own focus in ISO31000 to look more at impacts.
The situation Tim describes with the UK Financial Sector is truly appalling. How long before others countries follow suit? Not long I would suggest – this will enable them to have a safe process to get compliance ticks.
Well said Tim, but I am not optimistic that too many are really listening.
What do you think?
