Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2023

The Human Side of Conducting BIAs By MICHAEL HERRERA I recently had an engagement at a Fortune 500 company where three of our consultants conducted about 100 BIAs. With so many BIAs to conduct, they naturally encountered a few bumps in the road. These included the following: n The session where the leader of the n A business unit which took two sessions to complete its BIA (rather than the usual one) because they brought many people more than the requested number, and every attendee weighed in on virtually every topic. n The episode where a business unit supplied us with data on its current processes and confirmed its accuracy, In each case, our team swiftly regrouped and found a way to obtain the informa tion we needed to successfully carry out our engagement. However, the stories reminded me of a very common misunder standing about BIAs: people tend to think doing one is all about the questionnaire. In fact, conducting a BIA is mostly about working effectively with the people pro viding the information for it. Understanding the human side of the busi ness impact analysis is critical to its success. If you are not sufficiently attentive to this aspect of the job, you run a high risk of having the following things happen: business unit said he already knew their unit was of critical importance to the company and therefore conducting a BIA was a waste of time. The group left the interview without providing any data. then stated – after we had loaded the information into the BIA tool – all of the resulting work was invalid because they had gone through a reorganization. Then they asked us why we hadn’t known about their reorg.

26 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | SPRING 2023