Business Continuity and Resilience Blog

Our continuity and resilience consultants share their insight.

Compliance Box-Checking, Leadership and Risk: TBM SIG

Posted by John Robinson on Aug 25, 2015

The Total Business Metrics Special Interest Group met monthly to assist business continuity  professionals connect, share challenges and best practices and improve their work, led by business continuity consultant John Robinson.

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Tags: TBM SIG Blog, Small Business

Hard vs Soft Metrics, Resilience and Recoverability: TBM SIG

Posted by John Robinson on Aug 02, 2015

The Total Business Metrics Special Interest Group met monthly to assist business continuity professionals connect, share challenges and best practices and improve their work, led by business continuity consultant John Robinson.

We began the SIG talking about hard and soft metrics for business continuity management, hard metrics being things you can count, a result anyone could physically verify with a low chance of error, soft metrics the qualitative outcome of a judgement or opinion, often based on an aggregation of hard(er) lower-level metrics.  Soft metrics are therefore potentially less reliable but more valuable, since they may be concentrates based on subordinate layers of mixed soft and hard metrics.  The added wisdom promises greater apparent decision value but the judgmental component makes them correspondingly less reliable. 

Perhaps because of this organisations resort to counting prescribed activities, placing coverage above decision value, relevance or meaning of what they are doing.  We do this because we know we need to show that BCM is performing but can’t be seen to be ‘guessing’; we look for substantive evidence.  However the metrics we are able to collect, despite being accurate, don’t yield results the organisation finds useful.  They often don’t point in the direction in which everyone else is moving or support the corporate strategy. They become inconsequential.

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Tags: TBM SIG Blog

SLAs, CSR and Business Continuity Management: TBM SIG

Posted by John Robinson on Jun 16, 2015

The Total Business Metrics Special Interest Group met monthly to assist business continuity professionals connect, share challenges and best practices and improve their work, led by expert business continuity consultant John Robinson. 

This was another purposeful and valuable debate, addressing questions raised by attendees and I’ll briefly summarise my interpretation of what we learned. 

We heard about a large organisation who had succeeded in annexing business continuity management (BCM) to the CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) agenda – a powerful corporate driver, lending it presence, traction and influence where previously visibility had been an issue.  Similarly, governance is a known powerful customer-visible continuity driver, and I’ve seen all manner of alliances like this with varying degrees of success. 

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Tags: TBM SIG Blog