Disaster Recovery Journal

For those who are trying to re-invent the wheel regarding how to assess their BCM program, I'm reposting my stab at it, a spreadsheet tool that takes the DRII/BCI  "Ten Areas of Professional Practice in BCM," and enables you to "weight" each element according to your organizations risk appetite, and come up with an overall measure of how resilient (or not) your program is.

Given the recent data theft at Epsilon, a marketing and communications provider to some of the country's largest companies, I'm assuming that many managers walked into a meeting this morning with an agenda similar to the following: 

Welcome to the second in a series of DRJ blog posts about the Business Continuity Planning Model developed by DRI International. This post builds on our first blog post in this series that discussed Project Initiation and Management and this week (and next) we will discuss Risk Evaluation and Control.

Each of the blog posts in this series takes a subject area as its central theme and provides further details on how you can put these practices into operation in your business environment. We will be referencing the Generally Accepted Practices (GAP) document developed by the DRJ Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) Generally Accepted Business Continuity Practices Committee and partner organizations (ARMA, DRII, FSTC and NFPA).

Those of us who "test" their risk management plans usually check to see the reaction at the crisis point; when the event occurs and immediately thereafter.

If you are one of the 20 million subscribers to Netflix then you have probably seen excellent customer service in action. From time to time they have a service interruption. (That’s a nice way of saying their service went down, failed, or broke.) Every time they do, I get an email apologizing for the problem and offering one free day of service as compensation. If I was affected by the outage, I click a link and get credit on my next bill.

What is even more impressive about this is that Netflix is under no obligation to do it. There is no SLA requiring them to give me credit when the service is down. The do it to keep customers happy.  Cloud vendor’s should follow Netflix’s example.

I know just how he felt.  If you're a practitioner of business continuity management, perhaps you do too.  I've been banging this drum for... a dozen years, using varying approaches and tones, about there being a vast difference between BCM and planning to recover IT services.  Are they related?  Of course they are, but it wasn't until I learned of the lovely ITIL term "IT service continuity," that I found a reasonably accurate and distinguishing term that clearly separates IT "DR" from the efforts to plan recovery of critical business operations, like manufacturing, service delivery, et cetera.

Some may ask: Why get so bent out of shape over terminology?  Here's why:  In the last five years, I've spent more than my share of time looking for my next job or project.  But the percentage of "business continuity jobs" posted are strictly for techies - people very comfortable talking bits and bytes.  I've lost count of the technical recruiters I've tried to educate on the difference to the point I've given up.  It's a fool's errand.

As you may have heard, DRJ Spring World 2011 has gone mobile.  This morning, I downloaded the free Conventionist app for my iPad 2 and was instantly impressed at how the app organized and presented everything I need to know about DRJ Spring World:

• Interactive schedule of events that provides the ability to “add to my events” page and select event reminders
• Conference maps and floor plans
• To-do list that can capture tasks prior-to and during the conference
• Live Twitter feed that aggregates the #DRJSpring hashtag (see below)
• Exhibitor listing with organizational information and booth locations
• Key events listing that highlights general-admission events

Available for the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android devices, I think the Conventionist app will be an asset to conference attendees.  Not only will the app make planning to attend sessions and events easier, it will also make it easier to “go green” by eliminating paper waste.

With all the activity in Japan, many people are starting to realize their supply chain is a critical part of their business.

Oh no…  There is a storm coming!

Oh no…  There is a labor strike coming!