Posts tagged with business strategy

Though I am seeing this change slowly in organizations across industries, most companies still separate IT disaster recovery from business-side continuity and process resumption planning. As planners, and often the IT guys realize this too, it is incredibly difficult for IT to prioritize and determine the appropriate technology investments without knowing what is important to the business… and how important in terms of quantifiable dollars-at-risk data.  Read More

Among an organization’s most important and valuable assets is its reputation. This applies equally to companies, departments and even project teams.Business continuity and disaster recovery planning is not just about mitigating loss and improving up-time, availability and maintaining customer service through an outage.  It’s not just about getting ‘back to normal’. It’s also not just about ‘learning from the experience’ to avoid the disaster or better-managing a similar event in the future.  Read More

That is the question… sort of an informal survey regarding business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

Part 1. Choosing between your employees and your technology, which exposes your company to the greatest risk?

And by ‘risk’ I mean which, if managed poorly and failed, would result in the greatest loss, but, if managed and executed well, would result in the greatest increase in profit for your company?  Read More

Years ago, in a conversation about ERP systems with the president of a Tier 1 automotive supplier, he said something that will forever stay with me.  We were talking about whether we (the company) should retire our legacy system in favor of SAP.  He said that if he really had his choice, we should develop our own solution in-house.  Puzzled, I pushed further and asked him what would drive him to reach such a conclusion with SAP, Oracle, our legacy product and a number of other industry-specific solutions available.  He responded that he doesn’t want to change the way he manages the business to make it fit with some off-the-shelf application according to how some software developer or any other company thinks his business should be managed.  Read More

If you have never put much thought into managing risk in your organization, a risk assessment is the place to start.  It can be an eye-opener for a number of reasons.  First, you’ll quickly see that no risk management methodology is going to allow your organization to avoid all potential loss.  Second, if you have never done an assessment before, you may be shocked to find just how many threats exist to your organization and how vulnerable you are.  Third, you may be equally surprised to find that there are likely several actions you can take in the near term, with little or no cash investment, to mitigate some of that downside risk.  Read More

You know, several years ago… back when the Palm Pilot first came out, I was all over it.  I was an early gadget junky and had to have everything techie.  Back then, I was the typical IT guy walking around with a cell phone (a big, bulky one), two pagers and my PDA hanging from my “utility belt”.  I was an IT super hero.  Read More

Yesterday I had the pleasure of sitting down and chatting with Larry Smith, President of the Institute for Crisis Management.   Among the many valuable insights gleamed from that meeting was a reminder of the months preceding the feared “Y2K”.  Read More

Much of the time when industry professionals talk about continuity or recovery planning, they’re talking about it in reference to the impact of natural or other physical disasters.  And while that is certainly a requirement for ensuring survival of any organization, there is more to consider.  Read More