Continuity in recession
These are turbulent times for businesses, tumbling from the realisation of sub-prime into the credit crunch and now a sustained period of global recession. But what does it mean for business continuity? Is it now a dispensable overhead – a hygiene factor, a luxury that organizations can afford to forego, or are we missing something?
The following underpin the way we implement business continuity management and help understand how we might manage the effects of recession:
- Each organization has a unique, frequently changing and multi-faceted continuity risk profile. It typically includes a range of improbable but potentially catastrophic events, from climatic or weather extremes to technology failure, from civil unrest to terrorism.
- Each organization, knowingly or inadvertently through its actions, also exhibits a continuity risk appetite. This is usually stated via policy and sets out the exposure to continuity risk that stakeholders willingly accept and, by implication, requires mitigation of any risks that they are unwilling to take. Executives are then legally obliged to ensure that continuity risks are effectively managed against policy.
- Funding both facilitates, constrains and shapes risk management since there are typically many treatments available for any given risk condition at widely varying cost. None is absolute and all leave a residue, such as exclusions and excesses written into insurances. Best value and hence governance is achieved at the point where cost and residual risk are both acceptably minimised for stakeholders.
Many of us will acknowledge the fact that our organization is probably less resilient than it was a year ago. Yet, in a crisis we may now need to respond faster than our BIA suggests but with less funding, less organizational focus and less resource. We need to be more aware of the new risks we face and ensure we have the information we need to negotiate them. The recession has major implications for BCM, and we need to become better informed, more agile, and more persuasive, delivering value through tough times.
See Continuity in Recession by John Robinson, FBCI, managing director of INONI Ltd
