Business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan is activity to help organisation prepare for disruptive events and it is essential to consider the potential impact of disaster and understand the underlying risks. In this my research, i explore business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning and its importance in support of operation and establish to manage availability of critical process in the event of interruption. Is business continuity management a dead end? in order to progress, the business continuity profession needs to develop executive gravitas, says nathaniel forbes. what's the future career path for today's business continuity professional? i've plodded along a bcm career path for 14 years, and i don't see a light at the end of the tunnel. Here's a simplified job description for a business continuity managers in a multinational company in asia, and maybe where you live, too: 1. Struggle for modest funding in good times, grovel for derisory funding in bad times. I'm not making a judgment about the value of business continuity management or bcm professionals.

Persuasive Essay on Christopher Columbus

I'm making a judgment about the long term prospects in our profession for the vast majority of practitioners today. I know several regional, national or international business continuity directors who get to travel, manage the work of others, make presentations at industry conferences, and give interviews to reporters. But i hope they'll be happy doing the same thing in 2020 because i just can't see many of them moving up the corporate organizational chart. When i'm recruiting a bcm person, for example, i usually ask that old hr interview chestnut: where do you see yourself in five years? the candidate never waxes rhapsodic about her vision of an upwardly mobile future in the profession. Your average business continuity professional isn't asked to contribute to strategic business decisions at the executive level or in the board room, at least not here in asia. She spends her time and the company's money planning for possibilities that everyone agrees probably won't happen. It's just difficult to chart an upward career path for a person whose job is to plan for the apocalypse if asteroids never smash into the planet.

An employee steals a purse, smokes dope, assaults a colleague or has a mental breakdown: the human resources department has procedures for all that. Caustic liquid spills on the warehouse floor? eh amp s environment, health and safety mops it up. The electricity fails, the lights go out, the hvac shuts down, the toilet backs up: quick, get facilities down here.

Bipolar Disorder Research Paper Apa Form

But a business continuity manager? he's inconspicuously hoping the world ends so he can justify his existence. A soldier, a fireman, a cop and an ambulance driver have jobs that are often described as hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. A business continuity manager's job can be characterized as months no, years of pushing wet spaghetti uphill, punctuated by infrequent moments of testing. In my experience, a lot of business continuity professionals simply get bored after a while. Business impact analysis bia may be the foundation of all bcm programs, and doing it properly can take weeks or months.

But it eventually boils down to filling in colored squares on a table to illustrate the impact of an interruption on business processes. Filling in colored squares on tables is unrewarding at best, mind numbing at worst. The only thing more frustrating is trying to get management to pay attention to the chart with the colored squares.

Last year, h1n1 influenza seemed sure to be the stimulus package we needed for the disaster planning profession, particularly for those in north america who hadn't had the excitement with sars and bird lsquo flu we had in asia in 2003 and 2005. Lots of masks, gloves and anhydrous liquid disinfectant were acquired and stockpiled. Companies weren't allowed to buy it during bird flu because it was in short supply. My mailbox overflowed like a runny nose with announcements for disease related conferences and training sessions.

But in the end, this particular pandemic threat turned out to be no worse than the sniffles. The kind of people who like business continuity enjoy thinking about the unthinkable. Oh, you mean like computer crashes and stuff? no, no, i say, all kinds of disasters, like 9/11. And this is when? maybe 25 years after the first business continuity plan was written. I hear the drj conference in the us draws as many attendees as ever, so there must be new people coming into the business.

The continuity insights conference in new orleans reliably draws about 350 people every year, mostly senior bcm practitioners. The bci says it got lsquo almost 350 rsquo to its conference in the uk last november. Bcp asia's conference and the bcm institute's 'world continuity conference' were both postponed last year for lack of enthusiasm those events have each drawn about 100 people in the last couple of years. The number of people at business continuity conferences is definitely not growing, and i think it's declining.

In asia, the number of people wanting to get into bcm is growing much faster than the number of available jobs. I must get three inquiries a week just from india, where they're turning out future business continuity professionals, but where companies have not yet gotten that ol' time bcm religion. the future of business continuity management so where is the business continuity profession going? more importantly, where is your career going? let me try to shine a light toward the end of the tunnel. The notion of bcm as an organizational silo simply will not survive another decade at most western multinational companies, in my opinion.

A ceo, a board of directors, a regulator all want just one person one phone number to call when the business runs off the rails. Business continuity management intersects with so many other corporate disciplines that also contribute to corporate resilience security, emergency response, environmental health and safety, risk management, disaster recovery and crisis management, to say nothing of human resources, facilities and corporate communications that it just doesn't make sense to build another, separate department. I expect that several organizational models that combine two or more resilience disciplines will be tried, and a few will become accepted management wisdom. Whether those will result from friendly functional mergers or from hostile departmental takeovers is not yet clear to me. Some companies deutsche bank in germany, for example, and ocbc bank in singapore have mooshed their bcm and security functions together.

It doesn't always go smoothly maybe bcm people are from mercury and security people are from mars. And a head of security is as unlikely to move up a corporate ladder as is a head of bcm. The most likely combination in banks and service businesses is bcm with operational risk management, one of the many dialects of enterprise risk management. My view of that approach is informed by a fateful chicken and the egg question that i apparently answered incorrectly several years ago. Spring singapore had recently endorsed british publicly available standard pas 56 and was promoting it to singapore business continuity professionals, as a precursor to a future bcm standard. A guy from spring asked me over coffee whether i thought bcm was part of risk management, or risk management a part of bcm.

But bcm is considered subordinate to risk management in every board room i've ever been in. I think your answer to the question is quite relevant to any discussion about the future of bcm, and your future in it. your business continuity future so, what about you? what color is your bcm parachute? a select few will climb the organizational chart by managing business continuity for more territory or more headcount or both. Over a period of years, a local bcm coordinator could become a national business continuity manager, then regional bcm manager, and eventually perhaps the global bcm manager. The number of positions available at the top of that staircase is miniscule, so that path won't be accessible to most business continuity professionals. To advance professionally, we will either become responsible for more kinds of causes, or for more kinds of consequences.