Ever since Frederick Taylor’s ideas on system engineering were shown to have a fundamental lack of appreciation of the human factor, businesses have been coming to terms with the messiness and at the same time the potential of human beings in the disaster recovery process. Taylor’s precept was that workers were too stupid to understand…
What people should put into business continuity plans is the information needed to get organisations back on their feet after disaster strikes. Leafing through BC plans often reveals that planners have made choices as to what to put in or leave out. If an item isn’t mentioned, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the plan is…
To put a new twist on maximum tolerable outage, we’re talking about the length of time an organisation can afford to stop working, not in terms of making its products or providing its services, but on looking after its business continuity. Companies that have dedicated BC personnel may never have to answer the question. However,…
In what used to be a business climate orientated firmly towards success, the notion of constructive failure has changed attitudes, hopefully opening up new possibilities for progress by liberating organisations from the notion that all failure was bad. There’s a message for business continuity test scenarios as well – it’s the “fail early, fail cheaply”…
In articles about business continuity planning, vandalism often makes something of a token appearance as part of a list of potential disasters that include floods, storms, fires, pandemics and terrorism. Like these others, vandalism can cause business interruption as the recent story of an attack on a cable bridge in London showed. The result was…
The latest “business continuity plan” on a worldwide scale from the BCI (Business Continuity Institute) has recently been defined in the organisation’s new Strategy Document. It maps out actions for the BCI for 2012 through 2015, centred on spreading BCM around the globe and growing the institute. The goals are three-fold: a consistency of the…