On Wednesday, October 23, 2019, we had the pleasure of presenting at the annual Bahamas Institue of Internal Auditors Annual Seminar.
The presentation centered around the need for the convergence of Likihood Management and Consequence Management. Traditionally Business Continuity Plans are pulled out after the fact and primarily used as a tool to manage incidents that have lead to disruption in operations. Our approach is to change this culture, BC concepts are seen as an ongoing active force in the regular operations of the company.
Critical to this discussion was the establishment of a working definition for Risk, we used
“The potential and probability for the loss of assets or the access, to assets, services, functions.”
This highlighted 3 important factors ‘Asset’ ‘Services’ (product) and Business Function. All depending on the incident could negatively impact operations if not replaced or recovered in a timely manner. This groundwork is important as it sets the stage for capturing a comprehensive snapshot of the organization.
All organizations like it or not face an amount of uncertainty and exposure. Thus systems must exsist to manage the controllable and uncontrollable variables, to ensure reliability and sustainability of operations, maintain competitiveness and performance.
Variables such as;
Location Value
Time Criticality
Threats Replaceable
Duplication Accessibility
Determining what level of uncertainty is acceptable and how to cost effectively manage it while meeting the organization’s strategic, operational, and tactical objectives is the challenge.
The developement of tools to address any array of threats, hazards and risks they may face,must be business friendly given the finite resources of organizations. The management system must have the cost restrictions built into it.
Our next addition we will talk more about the management system needed to bring about this holistic approach.