Business continuity buy in... I make it a point to attend a business continuity group meeting somewhere in America each month. It’s interesting to meet each of you, hear your stories and listen to your concerns. Interestingly, there are a number of common concerns that run through these meetings despite their geographic diversity. One of them is ‘Buy In’. How do we get high-level management committed to the business continuity program? So, for those of you out there toiling in the vineyards of business continuity, here is a salesman’s story. Somewhere along the way in a forty-year journey that has led from tech support engineer to CEO, I spent twenty or more years as a salesman. I sold mainframes when hardware was king. We sold to computer center managers. Great folks, they pretty much knew what they wanted and how much they had to spend each year. We had to compete with other salesmen for those dollars. Success was the result of establishing a good working relationship and demonstrating that our products had superior form and function and better support in the event of trouble. We got pretty good at it. Took some major deals away from some pretty sophisticated players. The world changes and hardware was supplanted by software. Everyone knew that hardware guys could never sell software. After all, it was a whole new game. Well, we sold software...to data processing managers. It was relationships and design features and functions suited to their requirements and of course superior support. As life would have it, software gave way to solutions, IT managers, CIO’s and more relationships and more sophisticated designs... One day, a friend and I hit upon an idea. The business world had changed and we were attacking it in the wrong way. We were focused on hardware, software, solutions and bells and whistles, when we should have been focused on business process. Business process! We should be getting out into the organization, establishing relationships with the departments that make a company go, learning their business process and understanding their concerns for the future. Our job was to bring technology to bear upon those concerns in ways that made the organizations more cost effective, better able to compete and faster on their feet. To some extent, business continuity folks may be attacking it in the wrong way too. Business continuity is about business process and how to continue those processes in the face of ‘come what may.’ Perhaps it’s time to put on a sales hat, go out into the business and understand those processes, develop relationships with organizations behind them and learn what their concerns are for the future. And, maybe, just maybe bring the technologies for business continuity to bear upon day to day operations in ways that bear fruit beyond ‘come what may...’
•Date: 16th August 2005 •Region: US •Type:
Article •Topic: BC general |
Mike Bemis, Voice Continuity Services
SPONSOR: Business Continuity from Backup Technology
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