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 - invoking a multi-stage continuous  improvement cycle that monitors and validates all aspects of BCM from governance through planning to testing and training.

3 - BCM Maturity level - a multi-level scale that uses multiple criteria (including the BCM Lifecycle) to regularly assess and express an organisation's engagement level. Usually expressed over a 1 - 5 scale where an effective "fit for purpose" BCP

For the telecommunications industry, or any other reticulated network utility, continuity of the business is underscored by the quality of two components -

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

• Company procedural - Scenario based pre-planning - 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.