Roberta Witty

The ongoing global economic crisis is having a severe impact on business continuity management (BCM), in the United States and elsewhere. Senior managers are being downsized to cut head count and compensation costs. Recovery projects and enhancements are being delayed or canceled altogether as IT budgets are slashed. But there is some good news: Gartner continues to hear that enterprises are focusing more on recovery planning. Why? Because it’s becoming clear that this crisis is highlighting a heightened risk exposure in many enterprises and therefore is the event everyone should have been preparing for all along.

BCM isn’t just about terrorist attacks, natural disasters and IT failures. The global economic meltdown shows, among other things, just how interconnected enterprises are, and how wide-ranging – and how important – BCM is today. It isn’t enough for just your enterprise to be prepared. You also have to look long and hard at your suppliers and customers. If your suppliers can’t supply — and your customers can’t pay — the impact on your business will be every bit as devastating as a direct hit.

And there’s more: When profitability is low, the damage can be felt much sooner and much harder than when financial resources are more plentiful. Business managers need to be ready to answer tough questions from senior executives who are making equally tough decisions about how to allocate increasingly scarce resources. And to do that, they have to ensure their BCM processes and recovery plans truly take into account the rapidly worsening global economic situation.

BCM professionals need to be asking themselves some very tough questions, too. Questions like “How will our BCM programs — our jobs — survive this crisis?” And “Is this a crisis for the BCM discipline, as well?” The answers to these questions are at the heart of a paradigm shift, both professional and personal, that we’re seeing in BCM. Some of the old ways — long, detailed processes that aren’t intuitive to the business, or focusing strictly on technology outages or loss of key facilities — simply aren’t working. And they aren’t positioning you, as a business continuity manager, for future success — or even survival.

The BCM professional must shift from a recovery-only mind-set to one that focuses on risk management and business resiliency. Business continuity managers must transform their scenario planning to account for the economic downturn. Failing to prepare for the business consequences of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression would be inexcusable. And downsizing the personnel who could put the necessary processes into place would make no sense. Not only would the enterprise be removing hard-to-replicate institutional knowledge, it would risk going out of business for lack of the workforce skills needed to recover from even a minor crisis.

Business continuity managers must also enhance their communications and persuasion skills, so that they can present comprehensive, well-thought-out crisis management plans to senior executives and line-of-business managers. Now’s the time to show the business how BCM really works and what it can do. For example, the business definitely needs to streamline processes and reduce costs. You have the dependency mappings that can help make that happen, and you should be using them. Expand your crisis management and recovery plans, make them relevant to the business and talk about them in the language of the business manager — right now — or you and your role may not survive.

The Gartner Business Continuity Management Summit, scheduled for 27-29 April in Chicago, will focus on the BCM paradigm shift and what you need to do to prepare yourself, and your enterprise, for the future of BCM. The speakers will include Emily Landis Walker, a widely recognized expert on emergency preparedness, and John Challenger of the outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Register now.

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Category: BCM and IT DRM Research Coverage     Tags: Availability Risk, Backup and Recovery, BCM, BCP, BIA, Business Continuity Management, Business Continuity Planning, Business Impact Analysis, Business Resiliency, Contingency Planning, Continuity of Operations, COOP, Crisis Management, Data Protection, Disaster Recovery, Emergency Notification, Emergency Preparedness, Incident Management, IT Disaster Recovery, Mass Notification, Operational Risk Management, Pandemic Planning, Recovery Planning, Recovery Plans, Resiliency, Risk Assessment, Workforce Continuity

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