Chapter Presentation

Florida Gulf Coast ARMA Chapter

January 23, 2007

Program: " Business Impact Analysis" 

Presented by: Allen Patrick, CBCP, CDIA+, at Raytheon 

The Cornerstone of your Business Continuity Plan

It is often said that the first step in a sensible business continuity planning process is to consider the potential impacts of each type of business disruption on each segment of your company. The argument is that you cannot properly plan for a disaster if you have no idea of the likely impacts of the different scenarios on your organization.

The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) should be considered the backbone of the entire contingency planning process. A well-executed BIA can make the difference between a fully developed, robust business continuity plan, and a mediocre one. Even so, it cannot stand alone – and without the full support, approval and backing from the highest level of management, the exercise will not achieve its full potential.

The fundamental theme of the BIA is to identify the effect of many different external and internal impacts upon the various parts of your organization in times of crisis. A solid BIA will help to identify which parts of your organization will be most affected by an incident and what effect it will have upon the company as a whole. In other words, the BIA can establish which business functions are the most critical to your company's survival.

Each organization has hundreds of operations in its overall business but only a percentage which will be key to its survival. It is these CRITICAL business operations which need to be identified within the scope of a Business Impact Analysis. For each of these business operations it is imperative to understand the personnel, facilities, systems, materials, and procedures needed to perform the function, as well as that operation’s interdependence on the remainder of your organization.

The BIA collects all of this data and presents it in a manner so that various contingencies, mitigation strategies, and resiliency models can be developed and considered.