I've managed to come across a very compelling business-case why business continuity professionals, facilities managers and emergency reasponders need to know a more encompasssing knowledge of each other's tasks, which also apply to small businesses.
Is your BCM robust enough to have a second back up? Vice versa, is your emergency response effective enough to ensure business continuity?
More of this will be discussed at EMPRR 2009 (24-25 November 2009, Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel, Singapore) in the panel discussion on Day. For more info log on to www.arcmediaglobal.com/emprr09.
An excerpt below
Thursday August 6th, 2009
Pandemic : business continuity
Today, we are used to see colleagues appear at the office, as if they would never be absent more than one day. With this “flou artistique” around the flu we have to take into account that key people may be “out of business” for two weeks. It is no problem, since most of the people can have a backup. What if this backup is also down ?
We do define for ourselves a backup and a second backup. The first person typically knows the business, whereas the second needs to be trained on the tasks to be executed “in case of”. What is crucial or not to insure the continuity of our respective businesses ?
(This is actually interesting, because we now have to tell people the essence of our jobs, which leads to a reconsidering our priorities
Procedures need to be explained and perhaps even made lighter, since there are less people to execute the different steps. What has to be done immediately, what can be postponed until the return of the key people?
For larger companies, things can be solved because the pool of people is large. But for small companies, people are already executing several (different) jobs simultaneously. How can these people become even more multidisciplinary ?
Systems have to be reconsidered. How do you manage them remotely ? How do you restart a crashed server remotely ? And how does a non-IT guy do this ? If you have a disaster recovery site as a backup for your IT, how do you manage a fallback with less and unskilled people ?
We are in any case reconsidering our procedures, backups, business continuity plans and try to consider many different scenarios.
Just in case of.
http://www.onemagazine.be/2009/08/06/pandemic-business-contuity/
