Business Continuity Case Studies

Examples of Business Continuity Management, Resilience Capability Development and Business Impact Analysis in action.

Finance Sector Benchmarking

Posted by John Robinson on July 28, 2015

In this case study, our client was one of the UK’s largest banking groups and mortgage and savings providers.

It has assets worth over £540 Billion and has 22 Million Customers world‐wide. The group Business Continuity division is responsible for protecting the organisation’s assets and stakeholder interests against events which could threaten the continuation of operations and the business as a whole. Group Business Continuity manages business units across all of our client’s divisions and in all locations providing Impact analyses, continuity planning, testing and exercising amongst other services.

The Challenge

Group Business Continuity undertakes an annual benchmarking project in order to ascertain the level of maturity of Business Continuity operations across the organisation. It seeks to provide a unified view of Business Continuity practices throughout the company, identifying strengths and weaknesses which will form the basis of future investigation and improvement. The process also measures compliance against internal policy and external accepted best practices.

Previously the benchmarking process was delivered by means of a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet. Over 100 questions were delivered to the participants who were asked to supply both numeric and textual responses. Our client found that collecting a large number of spreadsheets from a distributed population and processing the data to produce meaningful information for analysis was a complicated and time consuming task which placed a heavy burden on both participants and the project sponsors.

Group Business Continuity wanted improve the benchmarking process so that they could spend less time and effort collecting and analysing the information in order to direct it towards acting upon results and improving continuity practices across the organisation. They also wanted to minimise business interruption for those taking part.

The challenge was to implement a thorough, comprehensive Business Continuity Benchmarking programme which provides meaningful and insightful results but which places as little burden on administration and participants as possible.

The principal challenge was about how our client could collect a large amount of information from a distributed population, quickly and efficiently to cover:

  • 65 Business Units
  • 18 divisions
  • 9 countries
  • 1300 responses

The Solution

Our client ran the annual benchmarking project using the INONI tool. INONI is an online analytic system which is accessed via the web by all global business units. It works by gathering relevant information from users within set parameters which also result in an overall score. The system captures both numeric and textual data and provides intelligent analysis of results.

The INONI system also requires users to fulfil a number of identifying criteria which are used for both permissioning purposes and also allow the results data to be sliced in a number of different ways (e.g. by division, group, business unit, headcount etc.)

Once all the surveys had been completed, end users received instant online results in the form of reports and graphs generated by the INONI system.

Group Business Continuity were then able to view different graphs and reports online to assess how the participants had scored and could begin to look for trends. The data collected was also exported to Microsoft Excel where data tables and pivot charts were automatically generated. The team found the following advantages using the INONI online system:

  • Highly programmable, bespoke solution
  • Low administration burden
  • Highly detailed results which gave a greater level of detail and analysis than Excel alone
  • On‐line accessible anywhere in the world
  • Easy user interface which placed minimum demand on participants
  • Project progress could be monitored via a real‐time dashboard
  • Results can be archived to enable year on year comparison

The Outcome

Our client were able to gain quality, highly detailed results with which they could perform probing analysis, finding the organisations strengths, weaknesses, process gaps and pinpoint areas to focus on.

They used this information to provide a high level report of Business Continuity practices within the organisation to the company board as well as detailed reports containing targeted action plans to the participants.

Tags: Business Continuity Management, benchmarking