Business Continuity Management

Definition

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is the entirety of organization arrangements including policies, standards, and management procedures for ensuring that specified operations can be maintained or recovered in a timely fashion in the event of a Business Disruption. The purpose of continuity management is too minimise the operational, financial, legal, reputational and other material consequences arising from a disruption.

BCM is a holistic management process that identifies potential threats to an organization and the impacts to business operations those threats, if realized, might cause, and which provides a framework for building organizational resilience with the capability of an effective response that safeguards the interests of its key stakeholders, reputation, brand and value-creating activities.

The BCM Components

Effective business continuity management typically incorporates the following elements:

• Well articulated Business Continuity Roles and Responsibilities as part of the overall Corporate Governance framework of the organization
• Suitable Business impact analyses as a prelude to formulating the Business Continuity Plan
• A formal, agreed, documented, implemented, tested and regularly reviewed and audited Business Continuity Plan
• Appropriate Recovery strategies
• Testing programmes
• Internal and External Communications
• Organizational Training and awareness programmes

Issues and Challenges

Conceptually, business continuity management is distinct from Financial Crisis management in that a financial crisis does not typically entail business continuity concerns. An event that gives rise to business continuity concerns, however, could develop into a financial crisis.

See Also

• Business Continuity Guidelines, an overall organization of various approaches to Business Continuity
• Business Continuity Glossary, a compilation of terms grouped by Business Continuity topics
• Business Continuity Resources, collection of (external) resources around Business Continuity and Crisis Management