BCM World Conference and Exhibition - just another event?

         



Donna Monkhouse, Your BC Eye

In a previous blog, Deborah Higgins MBCI put the business case for attending the BCM World Conference and Exhibition from the perspective of a business continuity practitioner.  She certainly sold it to me, and delivered some powerful arguments that left no doubt in my mind that this is the one BC practitioners simply cannot afford to miss.  If you can attend just one event per year, then this has to be it!

 

The BCM World Conference and Exhibition is of course not the only BCM event in the calendar, in fact there are a whole host of BCM or related conferences taking place every year all around the globe.  So what makes this Conference stand out from the rest or is the BCM World Conference and Exhibition just another event?

 

The BCM World Conference has earned the reputation of reaching the parts other conferences cannot reach.  It offers BC practitioners a chance to be reunited with their allies and provides temporary release from the infamous ivory towers that Deborah describes, allowing attendees to dip into the cool pool of BCM and immerse themselves in a world where they feel safe and understood.  The Conference is the place where practitioners or indeed newcomers to the discipline can find out what’s new on the BCM horizon; meet with other practitioners from a wide range of organisations from across the globe; share, exchange and learn from their peers; and develop new-found knowledge and practical insights that you be applied to their own organisation as well as some great networking contacts. 
 

This year, Richard Reed, Vice President for Preparedness and Resilience Strategy at the American Red Cross will be delivering the Conference keynote, which promises to shed some interesting insights into the US approach to preparedness and societal resilience.   Reed, who was the former Special Assistant to President Obama and Senior Director for Resilience at The White House, will be looking at how major events including terrorism, health emergencies, major accidents and catastrophic natural disasters have shaped and modified the approach of successive administrations. 

The Conference is supported by a FREE to attend exhibition that showcases the latest BCM products and services from leading suppliers around the globe and exposes you to the latest BCM tools that will make your job and your life a lot easier.  See, compare and experience first-hand the latest trends and developments in BCM products and services and be among some of the first to witness some exciting launches.   With around 50 exhibitors under one roof, the Exhibition provides the perfect platform for some targeted investigation and market research and ample opportunity to talk directly to the vendors and ask the questions that are really important to you and your business.

The Exhibition also plays host to a FREE Seminar Programme that runs throughout the two day exhibition.   Benefit from some insightful vendor showcasing seminars on BCM products and services as well as some thought-provoking BCM case studies delivered by an interesting line-up of international experts and established BCM practitioners.  So if you don’t have the budget to attend the Conference, at least make a point of attending the Exhibition!  

Is BCM World Conference and Exhibition just another event?  I will leave you to decide.  I don't think it is.
 

 

www.bcm2012.com

Business continuity – a culture, not a plan

Dr Cliff Ferguson Ph.D. AMBCI

Business continuity is not just about disaster recovery – it should be a corporate culture.

This is the view of Clifford Ferguson, chairperson of the South African BCI Forum and Government Pensions Administration Agency (GPAA) BC Committee, who says that when business continuity is top of mind, companies can deal with any eventuality.

“The problem – particularly in government departments and parastatals – is that business continuity is seen as disaster recovery. But disaster recovery is only a component of business continuity. So organisations may know how to evacuate a building or locate the disaster recovery site, but they don't necessarily know how to keep their business in full operation in the event of a problem,” he says.

Ferguson says most organisations tend to draft a business continuity plan and shelve it until they face a disaster. “Most companies don't implement their business continuity strategies properly,” he says.

“A comprehensive programme needs to be put into place and be made a business culture. You need a top-down, bottom-up approach, with awareness at lower level and implementation from the top.”

Ferguson highlights his agency's experience in changing its corporate culture to focus on business continuity.

“In line with the requirements of our two major customers – the National Treasury and the Government Pensions Fund (GEPF), we had to implement a comprehensive business continuity plan. We engaged an international consultant and began training and implementation around two years ago.” 

The strategy included training and BCI international certification for representative senior management, the appointment of a business continuity committee, including three Exco members, followed by the training of other practitioners. Some staff volunteers also trained as practitioners. The programme did not end with training, however. It is an ongoing project, which includes fortnightly review meetings, desktop exercises, training and awareness days, and live evacuation drills at least once every quarter.

Ferguson says, as a work in progress, the plan is constantly tweaked and revised on the feedback of emergency services and staff.
 
“For example, we physically move staff to our disaster recovery centre during a drill, and then ask them to report back on possible improvements after the exercise. During an evacuation drill, the emergency services will give us feedback on any problem areas.

“This is unusual – organisations or companies could have a disaster site, but not everyone moves people to test their plan on the site. We make the people own the business continuity plan. We are doing more now and cascading the plan down so every single business unit has its own plan and its own emergency box, too,” he says.

Even though the business continuity programme is relatively new, Ferguson feels the heightened awareness has already benefited the agency.

Unforeseen incidents, such as the mail server going down or the water supply being cut off for days, could previously have caused problems. However, with the new staff mindset, these problems arose recently but caused no disruptions in the agency's work, says Ferguson.

“For example, we had no water and the sanitation facilities became clogged. In a building with hundreds of staff, this was a problem. But we were well prepared, made alternative arrangements and business continued as normal – albeit with some complaints. On another occasion, we experienced power cuts, but it was business as usual. So the training paid off.”

Ferguson concludes: “Business continuity planning is critical – unexpected things can happen to anybody. All the incidents we had could have happened to anybody and we didn't know they were coming. However, just having a plan and heightened staff awareness allowed us to continue operations without a hitch when problems occurred. If something big should happen tomorrow, we would probably be prepared, and as business continuity culture improves, so will our preparedness.”

Ferguson will address the upcoming ITWeb Business Continuity 2012 Conference, at The Forum in Bryanston, on 13 November. For more information about this event, click here.

 

BCI Gifted Grades and Awards

Steve Mellish FBCI

The BCI has two main ways in which we can recognise those individuals and organisations that go above and beyond the call of duty.

The Institute’s Gifted Grades programme was introduced in 2009 to recognise individuals who have contributed significantly to the development of the Institute and/or the BCM industry.  Any BCI member is invited to nominate another member, or non-member, who has truly added to the growth of the discipline or the BCI.  

Four categories are available within Gifted Grades: Honorary Fellowships; Honorary Memberships; Achievement Awards and Merit Awards – further details on nomination criteria can be found here

Recent recipients of Honorary Fellowships include:  

I must choose my words with care...

Ian Charters FBCI

English is a fascinating language with many more words in common usage than other European languages and many have multiple meanings where only the context can give a clue as to which meaning was intended.  Consider the newspaper headline “Bus on fire - passengers alight” ; do we know the outcome of that story?

When writing Standards it is vital to avoid this ambiguity, so the guidance to standards writers is to explain concepts using the commonly accepted meaning of words and to avoid technical terms (leaving the accompanying Guidance document to relate the concepts to the industry terms).  However, this can still lead to ambiguity when communicating outside the business continuity realm, so it is imperative to achieve clarity of meaning in discussions with your colleagues.

Business Continuity – not just for big companies and big events!

Lyndon Bird FBCI

The London Olympics is now over and we are still coming to terms with its success. Those who had predicted chaos and possibly carnage have been proven wrong.  Every few years an event or threat seems to emerge that gets everyone’s attention. Sometimes it is an esoteric threat that few understand like the millennium bug; sometimes it something that might harm us personally like a pandemic; sometimes it is a massive event that might go dramatically wrong in innumerable ways. The odd thing is that the predictions of doom and destruction thankfully never seem to manifest themselves.

Now this is not being complacent, in fact just the reverse. The positive message about this is that however complicated, large or frightening a threat seems to be it can usually be mitigated perfectly well by good planning, good organisation and plenty of practice. The Olympics did not just happen at random, the organisers knew the dates and schedules for years, they had the brainpower and expertise of leading experts from around the world to call on, and they had time to test and rehearse everything until it was perfect.

The problem most organisations face in dealing with Business Continuity, however, is precisely the reverse of such high profile threats. If something that is totally unpredictable happens at a random time and causes large losses of property, assets or even lives what can you do to protect yourself or your organisation? Unlike the millennium bug or the Olympics you have no idea what the real threat is or when it could show itself. Business Continuity Management (BCM) addresses this paradox by concentrating on impacts rather than causes. It is impossible to identify every threat faced by an organisation or the exact way in which even predictable threats like fire or flooding will affect different businesses or individuals.

However, it is possible to identify what products or services must be delivered in what timeframes, what resources need to be in place to allow that to happen and how an organisation needs to be ready to deal rapidly with any crisis regardless of cause. For example, those organisations that had planned for staff shortages during a possible pandemic already had the key components for their Olympic plan. The threat during a pandemic was that staff would be too ill to come to work; the threat during the Olympics was that they simply couldn’t get to work because of travel difficulties. However the BCM question was the same:  “how do we continue our critical activities with low staff levels in the office?” Concentrating on impacts, rather than threats is at the heart of BCM.

The UK Cabinet Office believes that this message is one that small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) need to hear and heed. They claim that SMEs account for 99.9% of all private sector enterprises, 59.4% of private sector employment and 50.1% of private sector turnover. Without a resilient SME sector the UK is unlikely to kick start the economy anytime soon. BCM will not achieve this on its own accord but it is a core component to security, longevity and success for any organisation.

The UK had a great Olympics by making the right decisions, plans and provisions well in advance. Just because you cannot predict the exact nature of a threat doesn’t mean you cannot do the same by concentrating on what is really important for you to accomplish - regardless of the external circumstances you find yourselves in.