Just when you thought you’d figured out DR, up pops a new concept – now it’s DR for “Disaster Resilience”, as well as for disaster recovery. Entities like the Australian Government and the Australian Emergency Management Institute are getting in on the act, so it might be good to know what’s going on and what the impact might be on enterprises and organisations in general. Two aspects in particular are of interest: the notion of connectivity for increased resilience; and the way the government is raising awareness.
“United we stand, divided we fall” is the underlying principle of the nationwide strategy on disaster resilience. The idea is to build in resilience at community and country levels to protect against disasters affecting entire sectors of the population – floods, fires, earthquakes and so on. While the nitty-gritty of “what, where, when and how” is not always so obvious, connectivity between communities stands out as a major component. Being part of a nationwide resilience programme can help individual organisations to know what has been done to avoid or mitigate larger-scale risks, and therefore how this fits with their individual plans.
Getting people to take in the information is the next step. Org charts and strategy documents are one way to communicate, but the government-sponsored “Disaster Resilient Australia” programme has a few more up its sleeve as well. Besides developing a brand of the same name (for marketing the concept to the masses), “DRA” offers a mobile phone app called “DisasterWatch”. Multimedia applications entitled “Before the Storm” and “Disaster Mapper” are also available, with schools as a priority. If these tools attract a lot of users, they might also be models to follow for awareness campaigns within individual enterprises for “good, old disaster recovery”.