Community resilience: the next stage in business continuity thinking?
Companies and entities that are new to business continuity often focus their efforts solely within the boundaries of their organization. As their business continuity arrangements mature their horizon expands to include supply chain vulnerabilities and any threats posed by the activities of other companies located close by. This is where many business continuity managers stop. But there is a further dimension to business continuity planning which the profession’s innovators are starting to consider: this is the importance of community resilience. No business exists in a vacuum: it has dependencies on its local community. Employees, suppliers and customers may all come from the local area. The availability of all critical infrastructures is dependent on the local ‘last mile’. If the community is impacted, then the business is also impacted. Good business continuity planning therefore needs to take into account dependencies in the local community and, for self preservation rather than for altruistic reasons, needs to become involved in helping enhance the resilience of the local community. There is a temptation for businesses to see community resilience as solely the role of the local authority and emergency services. After all these bodies have the statutory responsibility for emergency planning and disaster response. However, in a wide area disaster your company will be just one of many voices clamouring for help and you will have no guarantee of assistance in time to meet your recovery time objectives. For an initial period at least, communities often need to support themselves in time of disaster and such self-help is much more likely to be effective if some level of pre-planning has taken place. The first step is to determine what makes up the local community for your organization. This will have different layers, each layer presenting different risk levels and therefore requiring more or less input and effort. For example, if a business leases an office in a tenanted building in a business park on the outskirts of a town it may have the following layers to its local community: - The building layer: the community of other businesses which share the premises with it. The next step is to determine the stakeholders and community groups that you will need to work with within each layer. After this you can begin to take positive measures. These could include the following: 1) Working alongside local authority planners to support business continuity awareness raising and education amongst other businesses in the community; 2) Creating a local business resilience group and inviting other local businesses to join. Joint activities could include: - Having regular forums to discuss business continuity and share ideas. 3) Working with employees in their community setting. For example, making work area recovery choices based on commuting zones rather than the main office location; and enabling resilient home working to prevent transport disruptions affecting business continuity. This could also include being aware of local incidents which, while not impacting any company premises, have affected homes and communities of employees. Support could be offered to help with areas such as transport, child care and re-housing: to ensure the well-being of the employee and to enable a rapid return to productivity. 4) If you are a larger company it may be appropriate to offer the services of your business continuity team as volunteers to support local authority business continuity planning activities. These are likely to be stretched for time and budget and your support may be well received. As well as making sense from a business continuity point of view, community resilience also fits well into the current trend for companies to take corporate social responsibility (CSR) seriously. CSR is a growing requirement of good reputation management and in many countries medium and large companies are now expected to have a CSR policy. To include community resilience activities within the remit of CSR could be a win-win situation; ensuring that the business is seen to have the community’s needs at heart, while at the same time bringing tangible benefits to the business itself. Make a comment / email ideas to add to the above list
•Date: 27th June 2008• Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: BC general |
