| The ins and outs of workplace recovery Most companies struggle with workplace recovery strategy. Discussion often revolves around insourcing or outsourcing, and the use of dedicated as opposed to shared recovery positions. Some question the long-term validity of facility-based recovery at all, given the prevalence of residential broadband and flexible working arrangements. While the home based or mobile approach works for some types of business, the social nature of the workplace is often integrated into the way we work. Removing that community environment can often have a secondary impact on business process, which is unlikely to aid in recovery efforts. In general, the only businesses that have success with this type of remote working are those who, to some degree, work remotely in the first place; that is, consultancies, sales representatives and so on. The argument I would like to put forward here is that of insourcing workplace recovery. This may only work well for those organisations with more than two office locations, but that covers quite a lot of businesses. The approach is in line with building organisational resilience into business-as-usual processes and, to use an IT analogy, can be likened to systems load balancing. The way load balancing, or systems clustering, works can be illustrated by considering three systems running the same software. Each system is interconnected and each may be termed a node of the system. In business-as-usual operation, user connections are balanced across all three nodes, but each node has the capacity to take half of the total transaction volume. In normal operation the combined system is working only at a portion of its total capacity. This means that there is no impact to the business if any one node is lost. If we apply this principle to workplace recovery, or resilience in this case, we simply increase the capacity of each facility to cater for a portion of the ‘people load’ over and above what would be required under normal operating conditions. In people terms this doesn’t mean that each office needs to have a high volume of unused space, because not all staff are required in the reduced operating conditions following an event. Statistically speaking, the ratio of staff required for critical business processes versus those that are not is about one in five, but remember this is just a ‘rule-of-thumb’; the exact numbers required must be determined through a comprehensive business impact analysis. Therefore, if your total staffing is 60 people across three sites, 20 at each site, then your staffing required in recovery may be only 12, or four per site. Yes, it could be argued that these 12 critical people could all be at one site but the idea is that critical functions are segregated, dispersed across the facilities to prevent this situation. Many will conclude that based on these figures there is no workplace recovery needed at all and that the organisation should simply send less critical staff home to free spaces for those that are absolutely essential for continuance of the businesses critical functions. However, the last thing we want to do in a crisis is disrupt those who are not directly affected by whatever event has caused one of the nodes in the workplace system to fail. Many have tried this sort of reciprocal workplace arrangement, where the so-called less critical staff give way to the more critical. In my experience few have been able to make this work in practice. People generally get rather annoyed when they are displaced from their personal workspace so that someone possibly more important can use it. This is a sure-fire way to cause some residual, personnel related, backlash from your disaster, which you will not need when you are trying to resume normal business operations once the situation has been resolved. It also makes testing problematic to say the least. In fact, all that is required in this example case is to provision two additional workstations in each location to be able to recover the critical staff from the office that has been impacted. The assumptions are that each office is geographically separated such that the risk of an event which impacts more than one facility is too low to be planned for, and that the one in five rule applies. Therefore, the provisioning of an additional six workstations across three sites will affect the same level of workplace recovery as contracting a recovery provider to provision twelve positions. Given that taking care of a couple of additional workstations per site will have a reasonably low overhead, the cost justification comes down to the cost of your owned or leased floor space over the cost of recovery positions with a service provider. I should emphasise also that these additional positions are dedicated recovery positions, not the shared positions that you are likely to subscribe to with a provider. If we look at this on a large scale, for a multi-story office building, it is more than possible that you may have to leave a floor vacant for recovery purposes. This sort of spare capacity is often sub-let and provides an income stream to the business. However, in this scenario the business has to pay for another workplace recovery facility outside of its own assets. My experience is that the cost of outsourcing workplace recovery will be significantly higher than the income generated by letting your spare floor space. Again, remember this clearly works only where business is dispersed across multiple facilities. In summary, if you can arrange your business-as-usual facilities with organisational resilience in mind then, in many cases, you can obtain dedicated recovery positions at a significantly reduced cost to that which you may currently be paying for outsourced workplace recovery. Andrew McCrackan is the author of a Practical Guide to Business Continuity Assurance, Artech House, Boston, 2004.
•Date:
4th February 2005 •Region: World •Type:
Article •Topic: Recovery facilities |
