Organisations often reach the same crossroads: should we bring in a business continuity consultant, invest in software, or try to do both? It’s an understandable dilemma. Software appears to promise structure, automation and efficiency, while consultants offer expertise, clarity and direction. Both have value, but they solve very different problems.
The challenge is that many businesses treat consultants and software as though they are substitutes. They’re not. One helps you think, the other helps you manage. This article explains the difference in plain terms and helps you understand which option is right for your situation.
BCP software is best thought of as an operating environment for a continuity programme that is already well designed. It excels at helping organisations stay organised once the hard thinking has been done.
Good platforms provide structure: consistent templates, a central place for plans, approval workflows, reminders, evidence tracking and dashboards. For organisations with multiple sites or distributed responsibility, this can be extremely useful. Software can also help maintain discipline — reviews happen on schedule, actions don’t disappear into inboxes, and stakeholders all work from the same information.
Where software becomes less effective is when it’s asked to provide answers it can’t. No system will tell you which processes truly matter, what recovery timeframes are realistic, or how your people and resources fit together during disruption. Software tidies the model you give it. If that model is incomplete or unrealistic, the system will faithfully preserve those flaws. In other words, it can make a shaky foundation look very neat.
A consultant’s value sits almost entirely in the thinking. Rather than organising information, a consultant helps you understand it in the first place.
Their first task is often to bring clarity: what does continuity really mean for your organisation? Which services matter most? Which failure scenarios actually threaten you? A consultant will challenge assumptions, expose gaps, and help you define recovery objectives that are grounded in how your business really operates — not in what sounds reassuring.
They also provide facilitation and alignment. Continuity decisions cross IT, operations, sales, HR, suppliers and leadership. A consultant helps these groups reach shared conclusions, rather than leaving each department to make its own independent assumptions.
And importantly, a consultant brings pragmatism. They right‑size the programme, remove unnecessary complexity and make sure you don’t waste energy documenting things that won’t make any difference during an incident.
What consultants don’t provide is long-term administrative discipline. Once the plan is built and tested, a business still needs a way to keep everything current — and that is where software often becomes useful.
The simplest way to understand the distinction is this:
A consultant helps you decide what needs to happen. Software helps you keep it that way.
Start with software when you actually have a thinking problem, and you’ll find yourself configuring forms and fields without being sure what belongs in them. Start with consulting but never operationalise the work, and you’ll find your plans slowly drifting out of date.
Most organisations get the best results when they put consulting first, then bring in software as a way to sustain and manage the programme.
The decision usually comes down to one question: are you trying to gain clarity, or trying to gain control?
If you lack a current, realistic, and tested continuity plan — something people across the business understand and believe — you need clarity. That is the consultant’s domain.
If you already have clarity, but struggle with version control, reminders, consistency across teams or producing evidence for audits and customers, you need control. That’s where software earns its keep.
Organisations that are growing, taking on larger customers, increasing operational complexity or dealing with heightened regulatory scrutiny often benefit from both — consulting to set the direction, and software to keep it steady.
A technology scale-up, for example, may find itself fielding more detailed customer questionnaires as it moves upmarket. The leadership believes they have “a plan”, but it’s fragmented across departments. A consultant can quickly establish what really matters, define realistic recovery timeframes and run a scenario to test it. Software then gives the company a simple way to evidence this work during sales cycles without creating new overhead.
A manufacturer with a single critical site facing operational risk may benefit from facilitated dependency mapping and scenario analysis — uncovering supply chain vulnerabilities or the practical limits of manual workarounds. Once the plan is established, the business may choose to keep things manual for a while, because the programme is relatively contained.
A multi‑site professional services firm, by contrast, may already have plans in place, but every office has created its own version. They don’t need to start from scratch; they need consistency. A short consulting review can align what “good” looks like, while a software platform ensures those standards are applied and maintained across the entire organisation.
Consulting tends to deliver clarity quickly. Workshops, targeted analysis and a short series of decision‑making sessions can give an organisation a reliable continuity framework in a matter of weeks. The outcomes are strategic: you understand what matters, why it matters, and what you need to recover — and you gain confidence that your approach is rooted in reality.
Software’s benefits accumulate over time. Once configured, it makes the ongoing management of continuity easier, more visible and more reliable. The value grows as more people engage with it, more evidence is captured, and more plans are brought under the same roof.
Most organisations spend less overall when they combine the two in the right order. Consulting prevents over-buying or misconfiguring software, and software prevents consulting outputs from becoming static documents.
The same mistakes appear again and again.
One is marking everything as critical. This usually happens when teams try to “do continuity” by filling out forms instead of thinking through real scenarios. Another is over-complicating software designed for large enterprises when the business only needs a lightweight approach. And a third is treating exercises like an exam rather than an opportunity to learn — often because teams feel scrutinised rather than supported.
A consultant helps avoid these traps by focusing on purpose rather than process. Software helps avoid them later by keeping the programme simple, structured and visible.
At Inoni, we usually begin with a consulting-led implementation. That means gaining a shared understanding of critical processes, risk drivers, recovery needs and practical constraints. Once the foundation is in place, we can introduce software — but only if it will make the programme easier to sustain. Many clients choose our light-touch platform; others are comfortable managing their plan manually for a time. The key is that the decision is informed.
If your biggest problem is that you’re not sure what your plan should be, start with a consultant.
If your biggest problem is keeping track of what you already have, start with software.
If both are true, do them in sequence — thinking first, tooling second.
Either way, the goal is the same: a continuity programme that works when you need it, makes sense to those who use it, and gives stakeholders confidence that disruption won’t derail your business.