Stop restricting your continuity plans!

The Business Continuity (BC) process provides a 360 degree approach in order to instill resiliency in your business.  So why, when reviewing open Business Continuity jobs, are job listings overflowing with IT centric postings?  It would seem that the IT arena has cornered the BC market.  While I understand the basis behind a robust IT plan of continuity, after all, when my workplace's network goes down, I kick my feet up as I am unable to accomplish anything.  However, it is extremely myopic to focus only on IT as there are other threats to your resiliency.

Let's examine a small to medium sized business that manufactures "thingies."  What happens to your manufacturing line when your parts supplier comes up short on an order, or misses an order completely?  What plans do you have in place to fulfill your existing orders?

What happens when the fire department evacuates the entire area for a gas leak?  Yet the orders that are to be filled and shipped out by close of business today, are not complete? 

Or even worse yet, a recently divorced spouse returns to the worksite for revenge against the other.  While this incident can be tragic, your customers, or their customers down the chain, will still require your products.

Any one of these situations where the business failed to properly plan, can damage the critical reputation and cause customers to seek the products through another source.  These incidents are quite common in today's workplaces and yet they reside outside of the IT department.  Again I pose the question, why limit business continuity plans to only the IT department? 

It is crucial to evaluate all business processes, no matter how small.  Any one of them can and will upset your ability to deliver the product or service to the customers.  Many times, it is not known how much impact a simple process can have until the full business impact analysis is completed.

Therefore, when writing and editing your business continuity plan, complete the full business impact analysis.  Address all of your processes, no matter how small or trivial they seem.

Just like Emergency Management personnel focus on an all hazards approach to emergency management, businesses must approach their resiliency the same way - all hazards.