What is Business Continuity Management (BCM)?

Business into the 21st century is changing. Customers are less tolerant of delays and outages in service. With the advent of E-commerce customers have a greater selection of suppliers. In order to keep your customers and maintain your competitive advantage you need to manage the continuity of your business.

BCM is an ongoing management process that incorporates risk evaluation and control. It is a proactive process rather than the reactive process that is generally associated with Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity Planning.

In many ways it is nothing new. Managers at all levels of an organisation are (or should be) identifying and treating risks that can affect the smooth running of their area. The reasons for this include:

• Legal or Statutory Requirements;
• Commitment to the welfare of clients, staff and suppliers ;
• Sound business practice.

Proactivity is the key. BCM helps the productivity of your business by focussing upon the availability of the most critical business functions and services. Instead of looking only at the recovery of these functions and services when a failure occurs, BCM encourages regular review (and improvement) of day-to-day operating procedures.

In a nutshell BCM is all about managing risks effectively to ensure that an organisation can always continue to function at agreed minimal levels.

The key to BCM is a full understanding of your business. Can you answer the following questions?

• What are the key business functions and services of your organisation?
• What are the relationships between business functions?
• How long can you afford to be without key business functions or services?
• What are the key resources used to perform the key business functions?
• What are the risks faced by the resources and business functions?
• Who or what is affected by outages to key business functions and services?
• What are the consequences (impacts) of these outages?
• What would you do if significant outages occurred?

The answers to these questions are vital to the continuity of your business. Business Continuity Management provides these answers.

The Business Continuity Management Process

What is involved in BCM? There are four stages in the BCM process, namely:

• Initiation
  • Set policy, scope, allocate resources, planning, etc.
• Requirements and Strategy
  • Business Impact Analysis
  • Risk Assessment
  • Business Continuity Strategy Development
• Implementation
  • Develop Business Continuity Plans
  • Implement Risk Treatments
  • Initial Testing
• Operational Management
  • Education and Awareness, Training
  • Testing, Review and Maintenance
  • Change Management

ResumeIT specialises in the provision of consulting services and product sales that enable organisations to implement and maintain Business Continuity Management.

Resume IT has developed methodologies for Business Continuity Management and IT Service Management based upon Australian & New Zealand standards and worlds 'best practice', including:

• AS/NZS 4360:1999 - Risk Management
• SAA/NZS HB 143:1999 - Guidelines for managing risk in the Australian and New Zealand public sector
• Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Guidelines
• BCI and DRI Certification Standards for Business Continuity Practitioners