Business Continuity Planning for CEO’s

According to a survey by Symantec, more than one third of organizations have had to execute their Disaster Recovery plans. More than half do not think they will be up and running fully in one week if they had to execute their plans. 

We heard from IT Leaders at the recent Maryland CIO Roundtable meeting that the issue of Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) is perceived by the majority of CEOs and Executive Leaders as an IT issue.  As a fellow business owner I want to dispel that myth.  IT is only one area of the BC plan; your entire company should be involved in BC planning.

Below are a few best practices to get your business thinking about BC, and to ensure you have a successful plan.

• Since BC is really about business process, position it as a business process improvement (BPI) initiative and roll in operational value.   For instance, the disaster requirements are very similar to remote workforce requirements. This can impact revenue and operations if we incorporate it with our BC plan.
• Include a line item at top of the general ledger for disaster expense.  It creates a BC component for everything you do and keeps it front and center.  If you start thinking about everything as a BC issue it helps with understanding and becomes the fabric of the business.
• Scale the size of the plan to the size of your business and nature of operations.
• Make sure employees know how to use alternate processes. It’s not valuable to have them if no one knows how to use them.
• Don’t forget to involve HR and payroll in the planning process.
• Determine the financial impact of downtime so you know what to do depending on how long you’re going to be down.  It may not be the amount of time but what time of day or what day of the week it happens.

This last bullet is critical, as the financial implications of a disaster can be crippling if you can’t serve your customers because you aren’t prepared for how to address system downtime.  Make sure you have a plan that works before a disaster occurs.  Please feel free to call or email me if you’d like some help on this topic.