A Post from My Soon-to-Be Gartner Consultant Colleague Belinda ...

I had some thoughts regarding Hurricane Sandy that I picked up from a few CEOs of major organizations that I think are very interesting ? especially since they are recurring concerns as business becomes more automated and more integrated with partners.

1.??? Not making decisions fast enough

Businesses typically conduct diligent efforts at defining various classifications of outages or disasters each with their own recovery strategies. What continues to fail; however, is knowing when to do what. As was the case with NYSE, they had contingency plans in place which are regularly tested; however, in hindsight, they indicated that they should have made the decision to not open on Monday sooner than late Sunday. This was the same case with Hurricane Katrina where businesses were slow to get off the starting block. The need to have predefined criteria of the timing of decisions is just as important as what the decision may be.

2.??? Inter-dependencies issue

Successful continuous operations depend not only on your enterprise but for those that you work with or rely upon. As indicated with the NYSE, even with built-in redundancies in their infrastructure, this may be a moot point if others in their industry, whether suppliers or partners don?t have the same level of redundancy.

Access to real-time transactional data is beyond the structure of one business or enterprise. It would behoove each business to review, validate and test with key suppliers that are needed to achieve true continuous operations.

In today?s complex web of inter-relationships, it is imperative that efforts for continuous operations also extend beyond the infrastructure. As was the case with September 11 and Sandy, the mere fact that all transportation was unavailable will impact your operations. You may have a fully operating? data center at a backup location but your employees cannot get there.

Category: Advisory BCM Process Event ? ? Tags: Business Contin, Business Continuity Planning, COOP, crisis communications, Crisis Management, Disaster Recovery, Emergency Management, Emergency Notification, Emergency Preparedness, Hurricane Sandy, IT Disaster Recovery, Sandy, Supply Chain Risk, Supply Chain Risk Management, Third Party Risk

Source: http://blogs.gartner.com/business-continuity/2012/10/31/a-post-from-my-soon-to-be-gartner-consultant-colleague-belinda-wilson-thoughts-on-crisis-declaration-and-interdependencies-sandy/

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