Strategizing Business Continuity

"In Strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things", Miyamoto Musashi

9/11 changed the way we looked at the world, at ourselves and the way we do business. Organizations suddenly realized what vulnerability was and the impact of various factors on business continuity. Over-night BCM or Business Continuity Management became the new buzz-word.

As I read the very recently released edition of Service Strategy, ITIL 2011, I came across some interesting factors related to Service Strategy and business continuity. The first was the identification of strategic industry factors and the second was the management of risk. Some of the quotes were so relevant that they reminded me of a case of a major telecom service provider. It was known for the quality of its voice services.

The ability to provide voice services to its customers were managed by a series of NOC (Network Operating Centres) across the country. Consequently to ensure seamless services for its customers in a very competitive market, a series of contingency plans were drawn up to ensure business continuity.

One of the plans involved the continued operations of specific servers at these NOC’s. It was factored in by the BCM people that some redundancy had to be built into the system in the event of damage or malfunction of key servers. Accordingly a set of servers were setup at an alternate location which would take over in the eventuality that the primary servers failed.

However one particular step to restore functionality needed manual intervention. Accordingly as part of the plan a quick reaction team was designated and this team would take the required action in the event of an emergency. The team members were provided specific mobile numbers by the telecom player to be called when the event occurred. It was thought the team members would be able to respond and have the back-up running in less than 30 minutes, an acceptable risk.

“Everything in strategy is very simple, but that does not mean that everything is easy,” Carl von Clausewitz

Unfortunately tragedy did strike and there was a fire at a NOC in one major hub. Voice Services went down. As per the business continuity plan steps were initiated to get systems up. Unfortunately it took more than 3 hours to get the systems on track.

When the post mortem was done, a fundamental error was seen. The quick reaction team was to respond when the voice services went down. However the means to contact them was through the same voice services they had to restore.

At times strategizing needs a common sense approach and understanding what to do and what not to do.