ADaM Use Cases - Business Continuity Planning
Business impact analysis (BIA) is an essential activity that supports the development of an organization’s business continuity plan. Its primary purpose is to identify the critical business functions within an organization and to determine the impact of an unacceptable outage of any of these functions. An outage can impact an organization in a number of different ways and needs to be evaluated against such criteria as the impact on clients, legal/statutory and financial consequences. This analysis should identify the effect of different external and internal factors upon the various parts of the organisation. It should show which elements of the organisation will be affected by an incident and the resulting impact on the company as a wholes. Our success is reflected in our average tenure of engagement being over three years with our fees coming from cost savings and efficiencies achieved.
The ability for an organization to maintain and control its business operations is not only related to the number of activities, but to the interdependencies between them. The ADaM Framework allows a progressive approach to capturing, modeling and reporting these issues. As a first step an organization must understand the relationships between its business elements. This does not mean that the whole organization needs to be modeled. It is more important to first develop an understanding of the critical activities. From here the model can be developed progressively to allow for more sophisticated analysis.
Such analysis will take into account a number of different measures based around Value, Cost and Risk. These measures allow for a focused approach to business continuity, relating directly to business objectives. When planning a change to a business activity, the value and cost of development and maintenance must be balanced against the risk in delivery. This is a core function of business continuity and can be complex due to the range of risks and impacts that may need to be considered. For example a change may be made to the organization to reduce the cost of delivery of a particular service, but doing so may increase the risk in another business area of delivering against legislative requirements. This scenario is an example of a blended measure and can be effectively analysed using a dependency model.