Institute Of Hospital Engineering, Australia

Infrastructure Business Continuity Planning

Practical Problems Encountered

Neil Whittington (Arnold Risk Consulting)

Neil.Whittington@ArnoldRiskConsulting.com.au

Crisis Management

Business Continuity

PlansIncident

Response

(Findings)

Advanced Incident

Investigation

IT Disaster Recovery

Strategic, Operational and

Project Risk

ARC Enterprise Risk Management

Range of Analytical Techniques,

Applicable to All Business Risks

Controls:

•Robustness

•Criticality

•Performance measurement

Prevention RecoveryResponse

Inci

dent!Hazard 1

Hazard 2 Control 3

Control 2Control 1

Insurance

BCP POLICY

• Driver: Good governance• Purpose: Focus on external customers• Problem: Internal staff needs

FINANCIAL RESOURCES

• Shortage in many industry sectors• Constrains BCP development• Seen as low priority (“couldn't happen”)• Solution: share costs with similar

organisations

HUMAN RESOURCES

•Shortage: to develop and maintain•Solution: shared effort with others; external maintainer•Issue: can limit staff buy-in

IDENTIFICATION OF POTENTIAL EVENTS

• Deficiency: available staff time• Prompts: insufficient for wide-ranging

thinking• Commonality: similar events in same

industry sector

BCP PROCEDURES FOR RECOVERY

• Weakness: Long winded script • Result: Procedures ignored and hard to

find key actions• Solution: Quick reference cards

CONFUSION WITH EMERGENCY RESPONSE

• Emergency: short phase, objectives mostly “make safe”

• Recovery: Restore critical business processes

• Teams involved: different skills

NO LINK WITH CRISIS MANAGEMENT (CMT)

•Senior management role (CMT): stakeholders, authorizations

•BCP: recovery actions w/o stakeholder distractions

TRAINING & TESTING

•Skills: inadequate, decline with organization changes•Solution: low cost, table-top format•Learnings: not included in BCP updates•Solution: easier with quick reference cards

GAPS & OVERLAPS

• Result: key actions missed (or duplicated)• Solutions:

• team priorities vs individual action • tabletop tests• adhere to listed actions

OVERVIEW

• Achievable with reduced resources• Share: development, testing, maintenance