| Grenada situation provides wide-area disaster recovery lessons This week the United Nations highlighted the continuing struggle taking place in Grenada to recover from the disaster. The issue is not finance - the world responded generously at the time - but seven months later most of the country’s housing remains in ruins; an example of how disaster recovery needs the sustained support of the international community. Grenada is proof of how difficult it can be to translate outpourings of international assistance into recovery and reconstruction. Hurricane Ivan destroyed around 80 percent of Grenada’s infrastructure, devastating its lifeline spice and tourist industries. It also left 90 percent of the nation’s 28,000 houses in ruins and most of these have yet to be rebuilt. In business continuity terms there are lessons that Grenada can provide: 1) However strong your business continuity plan is, without the availability of key staff to coordinate the disaster recovery response, the plan is not worth the paper it is written on. In a disaster such as Hurricane Ivan, people’s priority are very predictable – number one is to look after and protect loved ones; number two is to secure their homes and property. Their business responsibilities are likely to take a very lowly place in the priority queue. If your plan relies on people being on-site at an emergency operations facility, you need to look very carefully at the people you choose to fill the role. Are people with family responsibilities appropriate choices for your crisis management team? In a wide-area disaster scenario they may not be. If you have no option but to choose such people, what provisions do you need to make to ensure that they will fulfil their responsibilities to the business? Do you need to write into your business continuity plan ways that your company can provide the support and security the employee’s family will need, freeing up him or her to concentrate on the organisation’s crisis management response? The other ‘people problem’ which has become apparent in Grenada is the large scale of post-disaster mental health problems. The United Nations reports that thousands of people have been traumatised by the disaster and the need to deal with the psychosocial dimension of this crisis has become an important element of the recovery process. The government is trying to address this by formulating a national wellness programme. The business continuity issue here is that although your business may seem to recover effectively from a disaster, your employees may not recover as quickly or as completely. It would be wise to plan for this issue, since absent and under-performing employees could, in the long term, be a real threat to productivity and therefore to business continuity. An investment in professional psychological support services is therefore an important business continuity consideration. This should be pre-arranged so that your organisation can provide immediate as well as long term support to staff. 2) Many business continuity plans assume that disaster recovery will be a rapid process. However, while this may be the case for elements which are under an organisation’s control, wider infrastructure destruction may take weeks or even months to recover to full capacity. This aspect of disaster recovery is normally out of the control of affected businesses, and the larger the scale of the disaster, the more likely it is to be a problem. The best mitigation method is the simplest; locate mission critical business processes in areas of low prevalence of natural disasters and in areas where local authorities and utilities are well organised and well resourced and therefore more likely to be able to quickly restore essential infrastructure and utilities. If this is not a feasible option, then business continuity plans must take into account long term disaster scenarios lasting weeks or even months. Grenada’s problems illustrate the importance of resilient communities. A business is not a stand-alone entity, it is part of a geographical community, and business continuity managers need to understand the importance of this. The two ‘learning points’ above demonstrate this need well. To be simplistic, community is made up of people, property and infrastructure. They all represent points of failure in a disaster. In the community, the responsibility for coordinating disaster recovery and services to these areas will be the local authorities and the first responders, but as a business continuity planner you can, and probably should, attempt to exert an influence on these bodies, particularly on their contingency planning activities. In a wide-area disaster your organisation’s business continuity will rely on your community’s intrinsic disaster recovery abilities. Make a comment / add a learning point
•Date: 6th May 2005 •Region: World •Type:
Article •Topic: BC general |
