To many, there is
little or no difference in meaning between “Disaster
Recovery” and “Business Continuity” planning – but
in reality there is a huge difference in both concept
and principles to be followed when planning to recover
from each. Some larger organisations even have two
separate departments focusing on the differing effects
and consequences arising from varying degrees of
disruption to a business as a result of a major “disaster” such
as a catastrophic fire, earthquake, or hurricane
down to disruption to the business as a result of
adverse weather conditions preventing certain employees
from travelling to work on a specific day.
As the term implies, Disaster Recovery Planning is
all about planning for those major, catastrophic
events – that will never happen to me! The
tragic events of 9/11, and the horrendous consequences
of Hurricane Katrina in the US, and the major fire
at the Bouncefied fuel terminal in the UK which affected
a number of adjacent buildings and businesses all
resulted in the need to plan for extended periods
of disruption to a company’s business operations
- from which, statistics prove, many companies simply
do not recover e and, as a result go bankrupt over
the ensuing months and years simply because they
did not have adequate plans in place to maintain
their business operations following such an outage – because
someone took the decision that such an occurrence
could never happen to them.
Business Continuity planning on the other hand, takes
a much wider look at any number of circumstances
and events that could significantly? disrupt the
normal, and efficient, day to day running of an organisation
such that some form of alternative working arrangement
needs to be considered, and possibly implemented,
for even a short period of time, i.e an hour or sometimes
less (depending upon the criticality of the work
function being disrupted) to restore “business
as usual”. The list of such occurrences is,
of course, endless but have included in the recent
past such things as rail/underground strikes, petrol
shortages, power cuts, adverse weather conditions
such as snow preventing employees from travelling
to work, terrorist attacks as well as “access
denial” situations where the police have cordoned
off areas due to a fire or other high profile event
such as a road accident involving a chlorine gas
tanker, petrol tanker etc
Consequently, experienced Business Continuity Managers – increasingly
being referred to as Risk Managers in a growing number
of organisations - are constantly reviewing what
could happen, what could go wrong, what could disrupt,
their businesses, by carrying out detailed reviews
of the operational aspects of their business, known
as a BIA ( Business Impact Analysis) A BIA identifies
which parts of the business are indeed mission critical
and cannot be “down” for anything other
than a minimal amount of time to comply with certain
service delivery contracts or service level agreements
(SLAs) and those elements of a business which can
be recovered in a sedate pace given the non-criticality
of those precise functions.
The art of effective business continuity planning
however, is not only not forgetting to consider,
what might, initially, appear to be the most insignificant
of business processes, but which, after due consideration,
proves to have a major impact on a more mission critical
part of the business – but also not overlooking
the most obvious because reliance upon that particular
facet is simply taken for granted – which is
often the case where the recovery of an organisation’s
telecommunications infrastructure is concerned.
Putting these comments into context, whilst it is
obviously imperative to have both a Disaster Recovery
Plan to deal with those major outages that we all
hope never happen, and a series of Business Continuity
Plans in place to deal with the myriad of lesser
evils that might bedevil the day to day operations
of a business, the recovery of an organisations data
and IT infrastructure is always seen as paramount.
But is it? Recovery of a company’s data and
IT systems is obviously vitally important, but in
true business continuity terms, where the business
is trying to maintain a “business as usual” approach,
it is absolutely useless – unless everything
else is in place so that employees can continue to
use that data.
In terms of a Call Centre operation, there is little
point simply having a solution to recover your IT
and data systems if your telecoms infrastructure,
for instance, is no longer working, and you have
no plan in place to recover your incoming calls.
There is little point in having a solution to recover
your IT and data systems if you have no plan in place
to enable your call centre Agents to continue working
from an alternative location or locations should
the business’s single? Call Centre become in-operable
for any number of reasons including simple power
outages, cut telephone cables, adverse weather or
more likely these days, a ‘flu pandemic which
is now long overdue – at least in the UK.
So what issues are likely to have the greatest impact
on an inbound call centre?
Perhaps this might be an overly simplistic approach
but broken down into its constituent parts, a call
centre comprises a number of skilled Agents, sitting
at their own desk within their own cubicle with access
to a PC connected to a live database and a telephone
or headset. These Agents sit in expensive buildings
which are purpose built and either owned (at a very
significant capital cost) or leased at an equally
significant operational cost. All of these specialist
call centres require sophisticated ACD (Automatic
Call Distribution) technology capable of delivering
the incoming calls to the most appropriate Agent,
in the quickest possible time while also providing
the Agent with the most appropriate information on
their PC screen before the call is delivered. Every
call centre is striving to reduce call answering
times and call duration times to become ever more
efficient to the point of offering 365x24x7 availability……so
having invested so much money in creating such a
state-of-the-art facility wouldn’t it be a
good idea to protect that investment by taking a
serious look at the adoption of a comprehensive business
continuity strategy?
The crucial point here is that a many, if not most “outages” are
outside or a call centre operator’s control.
It is not your fault that some poor unfortunate digger
driver cut through the telephone cables serving your
call centre building, It is not your fault that a
fire in a building down the street resulted in the
police evacuating all surrounding buildings, including
yours as a precautionary measure. Neither is it your
fault that that half of your work force has to stay
at home to look after the children because the local
school has been closed by the Government because
the long feared ‘flu pandemic has arrived.
And if the above examples are still insufficient
to convince those of you who still argue that “it
will never happen to me” then there is still
the issue of Compliance with all of the issues surrounding
the likes of Sarbanes-Oxley in the US and FSA (Financial
Services Authority) regulations in the UK which require
a growing number of businesses, including financial
institutions (and their call centres) to adopt comprehensive
business continuity solutions or risk being closed
down / prevented to operate when their conventional
systems fail for any reason.
Given that the most important operation within a
call centre is communicating with its customers,
whether they be their own customers or somebody else’s
customers (as is the case with the increasing number
of outsourced call centres), where continual ringing,
an engaged tone, or worse still, the dreaded “number
unobtainable” tone is heard as a result of
a cut telephone cable, the loss of its inbound telephone
calls must be every inbound Call Centre’s worst
nightmare.
Business Continuity – Why
it is important?
Business Continuity is not about planning
for the major disaster which will never happen to
me, it is about planning for those mundane events
which happen all too often and are almost predictable
such as adverse weather conditions, strikes by un-related
industries and unfortunate accidents such as fire,
floods etc.
Business Continuity is all about
planning to maintain business as usual so far as
is possible should your business suffer an outage
or disruption which is no fault of your own.
Business
Continuity is all about maintaining confidence in
your customers and suppliers that you will be able
to continue in business should you suffer an outage – by
being able to continue to meet your customer’s
needs – and also be in a position to pay your
suppliers for goods and services already supplied.
Business
Continuity planning is all about being able to stay
in business no matter what the nature or problem
that disrupts your business for a day…a week…or
longer.
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