Disaster Recovery Journal Winter 2022

Shifting Baselines: Strategies to Build Your Program and Gain Support By REGINA PHELPS S ince March 2020, individuals, families, organizations, societ ies, and nations have been under tremendous stress. If it isn’t one thing, it seems like a hundred more: n Natural disasters – wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, tornadoes. n War – Ukraine and threats in the region, increased tension between China, Russia, and the world. n Diseases galore: new COVID variants, going on around the world and think, “Any program that does emergency response, business continuity, crisis management, crisis communications, and technology recovery (aka business continuity man agement) must be flying high!” My response to that: not so fast. The goal of this article is to dig deep and peel back some “faulty logic,” explore return on investment (ROI), and then dig into value on investment (VOI) as a likely better metric. The Dreaded Question

or three years ago. Or worse yet … never! Even with all the crises going on in the world, many BCM plans have not put into action. Most of our clients didn’t activate business continuity plans during the pandemic. It was a slow boil at first. Then when it exploded, there was nothing in their plans to really help such a cata strophic incident. So, the question is, when was the last time you had a plan activation? For most professionals, the answer will not be help ful. For many of our clients, the answer is not at all or once in the past X years. Return on Investment (ROI) ROI means – very literally – “return on investment.” This is a metric many of our colleagues use. What that means is you literally must prove your organiza tion received the same amount of money back, or more, as it was invested in your program. For some time now, I have been asking if this is the right metric. How do you demonstrate ROI in a BCM program? Two ways:

monkeypox, return of polio, avian influenza spreading worldwide. n Cyberattacks – ransomware, denial-of service. n Civil unrest – political violence, threat of a civil war, mass shootings. n Economic pressures – inflation, supply chain disruptions, economic uncertainty, market instability. You might be thinking, “This is a great time for our profession.” Anyone could simply look at the news and see what is

When an executive asks you, “What does your program do for our organiza tion?” What do you say? I call this the dreaded question. Most BCM profession als will turn to their business impact anal ysis (BIA) and point to forecasted losses “after the bad thing has happened” and deduce how a BCM program will mitigate those losses. Great! Then their next ques tion is, “When was the last time we used the program and plans to mitigate those losses?” For many the answer could be two

8 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | WINTER 2022