Business Continuity Failures

Continuity Central Article :

     While the British Standard BS25999 is being adopted in the UK. Business Continuity Management must generally be seen as an evolving almost sunrise industry, which as yet has to  establish International standards and more importantly the embrace or even acceptance by the majority of the SME business community.

The importance and benefits of BC planning cannot be overstated but the resistance which exists in the smaller companies must be recognised. The implementation of legislation and industry requirements such as CCA Civil Contingency Act and the FSA Financial Services Authority show that the importance of contingency planning is such that the National economy cannot wait for education or even carrot and stick development.

This paper examines some of the issues which may take BC planning out of the business benefit ideology into that of survival. The continual and regular statements by world wide governments of the risks and hazards from global warming, CBR Chemical Biological Radiological Bio terrorism may remove the usual luxuries of insurance cover, resources and alternatives. The potential scale and time line to recovery of possible disruptive events should alert not only the business community but the general public too of the need for contingency planning. The historic and perceived wisdom of planning for response to event consequence may require dual track planning alternatives, where defence and avoidance with resilience as key points of  focus.

The recent Buncefiled oil storage depot fire in Hertfordshire is a prime example of sunrise planning and failure. Here we saw business continuity professionals congratulating themselves on the success of objective and quantifiable response planning but the reality was that senior management had focused on subjectivity and qualitative issues. The clear and obvious planning failure was the management decision to establish a business in the blast range of a COMAH site, a known hazard with low rent and running costs balancing risk and chance.

The overriding decision making process of management can be seen in both pre and post disaster events with planning protocols invariably overruled post disaster by senior management who often see the wider picture. One of the most important rules of successful BC planning is to gain support & buy in from senior management but with senior BC planners usually paid substantially less than equivalent grade line mangers and many planners having dual management roles its easy to see why they may be overruled.

BC planning is so often held up as the process to survive and recover but perhaps it should be recognised as a more complex dynamic management tool. The reality from a management point of view is that disasters only happen to competitors or someone else so what is the economic sense in planning?.
The immediate benefits gained from impact analysis, supply chain alternatives and generally accepted planning procedures must be recognised as good practice which invariably results in cost reduction and improved profit. Unfortunately this benefit is so often seen at the periphery with the focus of course on continuity & recovery.

Competent management will almost invariably take control on the day of any disaster and the BC planner will often find plans don’t work, however the ground work to identify alternatives and recovery routes will have been discussed and perhaps challenged by testing. This process highlights the sunrise industry where so many facets of business continuity planning are unrecognised by senior management and indeed should form part of their own training instead of being seen as a new duty to be undertaken on a part time basis by a consultant or lower management grade.

This critique is based on experience at major events where history is so often re written in the form of successful BC & DR plans the result of luck an in place of the potential for spectacular failure .This failure isn’t the result of incompetence but is the sum total of unknowns and chance, a combination which cannot be catered for but which does challenge even the most professional of planners.

An example of this was the recent Sun spot activity and associated electro magnetic wave.  The hazard was that it could fry almost all IT and computer systems exposed, and this included telephone computer centres, the risk was low but possible, how many planned for this event? Wide area natural catastrophes are often seen as unavoidable and planning often revolves around home or remote working. This may work but for how long and how effectively? Would personnel be on full pay and would it be more economical to close?

Lets consider a major flood event, has the older more costly work force been replaced by younger cheaper employees. Have these employees worked their way up the property ladder or are they renting or buying in the cheaper areas such as the flood plain. Certainly in the London area younger workers are massed in the Thames gateway and they would be unlikely to be at work following a breech of the Thames..

Bird flu is said to be a very real risk and the death rate potential is seen as a statistic which few people or planners would turn into rotting bodies. Even fewer take the risk seriously and those that have probably stocked up on a few masks or developed working procedures. The reality may be that because of the usual need to hide bad news or refute it as scaremongering few are actually prepared for this or other major disasters.

The SARS epidemic in Hong Kong, Toronto & Taiwan in 2003 resulted in people being locked into buildings and this action alone may have saved considerable cross infection but could it happen here? This epidemic resulted in papers published by the CDC Centre of Disease Control stating that conventional masks and goggles or respirators didn’t work and provided no protection at all. This news should alert planners to the fact that they need additional input from unusual sources in planning and this takes foresight and movement away from the established criteria of planning so deeply cut into the foundation of the industry.