Chartered Management Institute issues its tenth annual report into business continuity in the UK

For a decade the Chartered Management Institute has published an annual report into business continuity in the UK, providing the most accurate resource available for measuring real change in the take-up of business continuity. The CMI has had various publication partners through the ten years, with this year’s report being published in conjunction with the Cabinet Office. Entitled ‘A Decade of Living Dangerously’, this year’s CMI report is based on the views of 1,012 senior executives from across the public, private and voluntary sectors.

Key findings include:

- Low level protection: only half (52 percent) of the respondents questioned said their organization had plans in place to cope with business disruption. While this figure is worryingly low, it is a 5 percent increase on last year, and the highest score ever recorded by the survey.

- Casual approach: 32 percent of organizations don’t test their continuity plans at all, a figure that remains largely unchanged since 1999 (30 percent). Just 21 percent of Boards take responsibility for business continuity management, down 8 points in two years. Employees suggesting business continuity is seen as important by their employer has also dropped – by 12 points – in the past year.

- Registering risk: UK managers are most worried about electronic attacks (58 percent), human disease knocking out the workforce (57 percent), the impact of severe weather (52 percent), and destruction of critical infrastructure (50 percent). However, just 42 percent of organizations have plans in place to cater for IT loss and only 30 percent are prepared to cope with enforced absence of staff or severe weather.

Since the study was last undertaken, in February 2008, it has become clear that the major risk feared by UK organizations has been loss of IT (40 percent) – a finding consistent with the fears expressed over the past decade. Unsurprisingly, given recent conditions, 25 percent also said their business had suffered due to extreme weather, but today more (44 percent) are worried about the impact than they were ten years ago (18 percent). In the current environment, it is also worth noting that 25 percent have experienced problems due to negative publicity or damage to brand reputation resulting from poor business continuity planning.

Petra Wilton, director of policy and research at the Chartered Management Institute says: “Despite warnings, and in spite of the huge publicity surrounding natural and malicious disasters, it seems that employers still have a long way to go before they can claim to be truly resilient. Particularly now, with revenue and cash-flow under pressure, the last thing any business needs is disruption to their services. In short, the UK will continue to suffer lost revenue unless business continuity management is taken seriously from the top, and throughout organizations.”

Bruce Mann, director of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, says: “It is easy to put off attending to risks, and let thought of business continuity preparation slip down the agenda. This short sightedness can be extremely costly. A failure to provide adequate protection could mean more than a minor headache lasting a few hours or days, but could mean a loss of trade to competitors and the eventual failure of an organization.”

The report, called ‘A Decade of Living Dangerously’, is available here (PDF)

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•Date:20th March 2009• Region: UK •Type: Article •Topic: BC statistics
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