BCM

iFACTS on - Business Continuity Management

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is one of the areas that are pushed forward by legislation, standards such as the BS25999 and the audit function.

These strong requirements force corporate management to act. Stakeholders will just not accept the company being managed without a formal BCM-System. Experience shows that management often tries to implement BCM in a top down approach resulting in a "BCP-binder" suited for audit, but not really implemented in the organization.

BCM is about organizational resilience. About being prepared for the unexpected and acting before it turns into a crisis. For example:

  • Incident at external supplier stopping the production (Nokia & Ericsson Philips mfg in Alberquerque).
  • Conflict between nations closing the market (Muhammed cartoons Jyllandsposten, affecting Arla dairy products)
  • Failed implementation of business system (unfortunately too many examples)
  • Goodwill, brand (Absolut vodka or Coca Cola being good examples of corporate value almost only related to the brand)

 

Two sides of BCM can be identified.
  1. How to handle a crisis situation as it is happening and all the plans and organization around it. Establishing the crisis team and doing the right things. Organizational culture plays an important part.
  2. The other side is risk management  - to analyze different scenarios before they happen and create plans and activities to reduce the effects.

Integrating a BCM-system in the day-to-day business takes time and effort. All organizational parts and activities need to be identified and mapped in relation to how they support the business.

 

In the iFACTS concept BCM is fully integrated.

Organizational assets (Project, IT, Facility, Competences etc.) are documented and managed including Continuity plans and Risk assessments. A performance score is calculated from how well the asset is managed in terms of requirement fulfillment, risk or non-conformities.

One important part is that each asset connects to other assets, for example Finance process connects to the Financial system, which connects to the IT Service Application hosting, which connects to the IT infrastructure Servers and so on. This dependency map is just a keystroke away, identifying the scope, the critical lines and showing how resilient the value chain is.

This is the very core of the iFACTS concept. All assets being managed in the same systematic approach and providing the platform for Business Continuity in a keystroke.

For more information about the iFACTS concept.