The main goal for professionals involved in Business Continuity Management (BCM) is to embed BCM as a part of your company culture.
There are many ways in which you can start to embed BCM: train all your personnel to work with all business continuity tasks, be very hands-on ensuring complete control over the process, make full use of technology, or anything in-between. The most important factors are the quality of the analysis and delivering the plans according to your organization’s expectations.
Whether you take a centralized or decentralized approach will depend on the organization that you work for and if it is larger or smaller, incorporates complex or simple process lines, or any other factors.
I have experienced several different solutions, and here are some of the ones I want to introduce you to as inspiration to help you find the solution that will work best for you:
1. Creating a network of Business Continuity ambassadors
When working in big organizations this approach might be the right solution. By delegating the responsibility you can achieve more and cover the entire BCM lifecycle. Very often this is a great solution, but it does demand rigorous training and governance programs to ensure overall compliance and quality. With the right training program and policy in place, this solution can be very effective and help the organization integrate Business Continuity into the entirety of its business processes.
2. Central control from Business Impact Analysis to Business Continuity Plans
The other key path is through centralization: ensuring that BCM provides direct support to the business by either executing the strategy yourself or with the help of a central team. This does demand a lot more man-hours and will make your team completely accountable for all the successes and failures. If you would prefer to retain complete control over the process, either because of regulatory guidelines or because it just ensures better quality in your mind, this will likely be the solution for you.
3. Leveraging Digital Tools
Nowadays there are many tools available to help you manage your Business Continuity Program. Through any number of different tools you can delegate, govern, or collect information and thereby help your organization create a simple and effective Business Continuity Program. If you do this right it can be an effective way to run your program, but it does mean a lot of work upfront implementing these solutions.
There are many ways in which you can run a BCM strategy that will make your organization resilient. The primary outcome for all these methods should in the end be the adoption of BCM in the organization, and that includes adopting BCM as part of the culture. This will be one of the most challenging tasks, but in the end also the one that will lead to a more resilient organization.
By Mathias Jensen
Mathias Jensen is a leading expert on Business Continuity Management and Resilience in the Nordic Region
