Business Continuity Management

I've been involved with the operational aspects of business continuity for a large part of my telecommunications career, the latter 10 years being responsible for developing BCM and Crisis Management for a large New Zealand telecommunications carrier. This is where my experience lies.

There are three indicators that define an organisations level of business continuity competence -

1 - A BCM Policy or Framework - endorsed by the Board and Senior company leadership that outlines how (and at what level) the company will maintain its business resilience capability.

2 - Business Continuity Lifecycle - a multi-stage continuous cycle that monitors and validates all aspects of BCM from governance through planning to testing and training.

3 - BCM Maturity level - a five level scale that uses multiple criteria (including the BCM Lifecycle) to regularly assess and express an organisation's engagement level.

For the telecommunications industry, or any other reticulated network utility, continuity of the business is defined by two parts -

• Network resilience - Installing and maintaining a physical network architecture that complies with a pre-determined level of traffic capacity, diversity, redundancy and reliability.

• Company procedural - Having in place overall governance and operational aspects within the organisation that have the correct degree of resilience to support its critical business functions (people and processes). This ranges from supporting an individual critical business function right through to pan-company crisis management.

I'll progressively add some further information that the reader might find useful.