Business Continuity now needs to join the party

I’m sure we all remember (back when such things were possible) a family party or wedding reception where ‘Auntie Mabel’ was given a cup of tea and ushered to a quiet corner while the party raged around her.

Business continuity, certainly amongst many senior management teams always had a bit of an ‘Auntie Mabel’ reputation. Management knew it was there, but didn’t really know what to do with it. Meanwhile Auntie Mabel’s relation - Uncle Compliance -  had joined the party, removing his tie and dancing to ‘New York, New York’.

The Compliance and Risk functions are an integral part of many businesses and rightly so. They have earned their right to be taken seriously by senior management, adding real value to the bottom line. Business continuity on the other hand often doesn’t appear to offer much value to the business. Not so long ago the responsibility for BC was often given to someone for whom no other job could be found - somebody on ‘the last seat before the door’.

This opinion probably wasn’t helped by the BC approach - getting right down into the weeds of recovery time objectives, seats needed, printers required. After spending weeks conducting BIAs within an organisation the BC manager would then be told by senior management “That’s rubbish, I can tell you in 5 minutes which departments are and aren’t critical”.  

We also have to ask ourselves what use were all the pandemic plans produced over the last 10 years? Were senior management teams glued to them as the pandemic emerged, grateful for all the work that went into them? I don’t think so. 

In the financial sector the Bank of England has signalled a greater emphasis on operational resilience - defined by them as “ the ability of firms and the financial sector as a whole to prevent, adapt, respond to, recover, and learn from operational disruptions.” All organisations, not just in the financial sector, would do well to have something similar at the heart of their approach to resilience. Business continuity needs to be right at the heart of of the risk and resilience equation asking the big questions: What are our threats? Where are the biggest gaps presented by those threats? How do we address those gaps? Are we correctly balancing operational risk against reward?

And this, more than anything will ensure that business continuity is demonstrating to senior management that it is adding value. An opportunity at last to get its seat at the top table.