Disaster Recovery Journal Winter 2024

A decrepit spreadsheet in Excel 2007, with neon colors, broken macros, and hilariously small font, is not a good BIA. “

Even if business continuity is no longer new to most large or critical infrastructure businesses, it is not as deeply imprinted on the organization’s consciousness and memory as other comparable programs. There are countless reasons for the communication breakdown, each unique to specific organizations or sectors. However, two in particular come to mind as potential root causes. First, business continuity has had to practice its own definition of “resilience” by embracing technological and social changes that have redefined the world of business since its inception. Secondly, business continu ity is up against cultural and psychologi cal impediments. Humans have a difficult time thinking about – much less planning for – a problem we have not felt before. The workplace context makes this even harder. For many employees, the link between protecting business processes (not explicitly part of many non-BC job descriptions) and contributing to the pro tection of life, property, the environment, or the economy–much less our own pay checks–seems very tenuous. The ask from the BC team appears both laborious and lacking in immediate, measurable value. We are often left with a growing indus try’s consensus of analytical methodol ogy, whose value must be reiterated and retaught constantly. The BIA process itself lands with non practitioners like a routine compliance exercise. It’s not so simple for the BC pro fessional. As Ian Charter put it in his renowned book on BIAs, we need to “understand how quickly the organiza tion needs to respond when a disruption to normal business activity occurs” so we can plan for it. A Fresh Take on the Value of the BIA Having spent a significant portion of my career in continuity working with vari ous types of impact analysis, I have given thought and attention to understanding and explaining its value in two organizational, industry, and indeed national contexts. Presented here are three arguments – do

not often appear in BC industry discourse – for the value of the BIA as a methodology. This list is not meant to be compre hensive but rather to serve as additional context for the non-practitioner or simply as fresh perspec tive for a perhaps weary BC professional. The Academic Argument The professional community and body of knowledge has strong consensus the BIA serves as the “foundation” for the BCP. Though true and suc cinct, the word has been used to the point it fails to convey the meaning in a practical sense. The “BIA

mation to make logical decisions about otherwise hypothetical outcomes. Thinking about disaster scenarios without praxis data would run significant risk of reaching incorrect planning assumptions. By the same token, the utility of the BCP for busi ness leaders is null if the embedded scenarios are not relatable to the actual process that’s been dis rupted – an achievement that requires data. To be sure, writing any good contingency plan requires imagination. However, the BIA ensures the col lective imagination of our planners makes the

right assumptions about what events could happen. It sets the scope and the guardrails of the plan’s scenarios. The BIA ensures intellectual coherence and integrity in the planning process by enabling experts in the business to develop and agree upon an understanding of what could happen. An academic’s conclusions are consid ered baseless without data showing what people actually do in the organizations of interest. So too our continuity plans would be rightly disregarded if they lacked the requisite basis. The BIA brings that data to the table and should therefore serve as the central guide towards unveiling those potential future realities for which we ask our organizations to plan. The Action-Centric Argument Disruptions can be described as events that manifest sudden changes in a given operating environment. To be sure, many types of crises are “creeping” or “cascad ing,” the result of many hidden or unrec ognized missteps. Business disruptions often contribute to the onset of emergen cies or crises, and improper responses to even small-scale disruptions may be a step closer towards a major crisis. Scholars like Karl Weick have spent entire careers writing how people respond to sudden environmental change as in a “

is the foundation of BCP” in the very same way “data is the foundation” to social sci entific research. Management literature is replete with studies of “praxis” (it’s what real managers in real organizations actu ally do in real circumstances). Praxis data is collated and analyzed against extant knowledge in human psychology or eco nomics, or against documented assump tions about realities of modern corporate structures. This is, in a sense, what the BIA is for. The BIA serves as a “foundation” because it collects tactical-level praxis data on what teams in our organizations actually do. Organizations are accustomed to seeing data of this sort collected for various kinds of performance or compli ance appraisal. We know, however, BIA data is meant for painting the picture of what would otherwise be hypothetical assumptions, allowing us to create possi ble recovery times and agree upon recov ery priorities ahead of actual crisis events. The BIA may be considered a founda tion of the BCP for two reasons. First, it generates and records first-hand informa tion about business processes in a way that allows us to ask, “What do you do if …?” Second, the BIA is a foundation of the BCP because it gathers the requisite infor

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