Business Continuity Awareness Week

Let me get this right - we have Shrove Tuesday, Mother's day and then Business Continuity Awareness week. I hope I can get the right card from Moonpig.com. I bet there is one!

Speaking as a man on a mission to sell the positive impact of effective Business Continuity I am going to do my bit. I will be doing it in the Philippines incidentally, with a Business Continuity Awareness week for an offshore provider, but no matter where you are, we in the business need more than a real incident to keep the focus where it should be. We need to channel our efforts to explain, to sell and in some cases to preach the huge benefits of a well-oiled Business Continuity Management system.

Too often a business works on the philosophy of 'it won't happen to us' or 'we don't have the budget this year'. Our message should be one of that it might happen to you and actually we can save you money with a good system in place. We can help drive efficiencies, help identify and minimise risk.

So let's use this awareness week to do just that - to get out there and using really good examples convince where we can, to anyone uncertain or unsure about just what can be achieved in managing a business. I give lectures to some very senior people about Business Continuity and often find the key is to look them straight in the eye and relate it directly to them. Not necessarily about their business, but about their life - how do they manage when something happens at home - do they make changes to avoid it happening again - do they protect and try and minimise the chance of harm to their family. Of course they do. It works as an argument and it is then easy to scale it up to a business. Keep communication paths strong, clear and direct; keep solutions simple and keep re-evaluating the risk.

Now trying to keep the agenda focused is clearly a challenge and when everything is going smoothly complacency can kick in so we must make the interaction constant, always be prepared to enthuse, and drive home the benefits. This shouldn't be Business Continuity Awareness week but rather Business Continuity Awareness Life until such time as it is instinctive in companies to measure their appetite to counter risk against a fully maintained and mature Business Continuity Management system. That may never happen but that doesn't stop us trying. We teach our children road safety, we don't stop that after one little talk, and we are always looking out for them until they can support their own children. In an obscure way it's the same for our profession; our role is to teach, to train and pass on our skills until the next generation of continuity professionals takes over. Blimey I sound like I'm about to retire - well not yet. I still have a mission and I will stoke up the fire and get out there for this week and the next and the next.

Now does anyone have a stamp for my card?

Mike Bourton