Critchlow Emergency Management and Business Continuity Management Blog

If you're not yet familiar with Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities initiative, now's the time to acquaint yourself.

100RC, founded in 2013, is a platform dedicated to helping cities worldwide adopt and incorporate continuity plans that enable them to establish resilience to the "physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century."

At Critchlow, we specialise in emergency management and business continuity management. Two things that are always important, but with recent events (read: quakes, storms and tsunamis) they’re at the top of many organisations priorities.

For the second year in a row, Sungard Availability Services (AssuranceCM) have made their way into the Leaders quadrant of Gartner, Inc.'s Magic Quadrant for Business Continuity Management Planning Software, Worldwide.

In this day and age, most organisations are finally realising the importance of having a business continuity management plan.

The 2016 BCI Australasia Summit is taking place next week in Sydney, beginning on Wednesday 4 May. This year, the focus is on “the individual” – how each and every Business Continuity and Resilience professional can successfully and confidently stand up against the challenging environment they operate in.

The time has gone when a “compliant” business continuity plan is sufficient evidence of an organisation’s ability to prevent and prepare for downtime and disasters.  Research by Sungard Availability Services shows that 75% of such plans aren’t used at the time of a disruption or during a test.  This is not surprising. Compliant plans developed to “tick a box” are not likely to be trusted, when trust is what you need most.

What is a CEO responsible for? According to Stever Robbins, everything. But ultimately, the success and failure of the company. But while the CEO has this very important role it doesn’t mean that he or she has to do everything. Robbins suggests that the CEO’s core duties are setting strategy and vision, building culture, team building and capital allocation – setting the budgets and managing the company’s capital.

Underlying these core duties is the responsibility to protect the things that are most important to the success of the business: in most cases this will be the safety of its people, the organisation’s reputation and its ability to produce products and provide services.  External and internal events have the potential to cause harm to people, reputation and products at the same time. It’s critical for a CEO to build a culture that is supported by the best resilience and incident management structures.

 I do love a good Before and After story

There are those that make me laugh out loud, such as the Sky TV ad with Sarah, the rustic French décor loving, Soho Channel watching wife who ruins her husband’s enjoyment for watching All Blacks games on TV – until he gets his wish that she be “more into sport” and Sarah’s sports fanaticism is unleashed.

Some inspire me. Formerly sedentary people who train hard and become marathon runners.  Cancer survivors who team up and take on dragon boat racing.  Then, there are the everyday heroes; the people who are bystanders, just doing their thing one moment and saving a stranger’s life the next. Some just give me a warm, fuzzy feeling like the plethora of home decorating shows that make me want to plump my cushions.

In an environment where there is little or no tolerance for business interruption, our leaders need to know that they have business continuity and disaster recovery plans that are immediately actionable at the time of an event.  And by actionable, I mean:  they are current, accurate and comprehensive; they have been tested and they have passed.  Put your hand up if your business is in this state of readiness. I’m guessing there’s not many hands raised at the moment. 

I’ve read this week that “almost 75% of users have never used their recovery plan at the time of test or disaster” (source: Sungard Availability Services).  Why is that?  Is it because people perceive that their company’s plans are out-of-date, difficult to access and a challenge to follow, so they are resigned to feel their way through an incident or test?