Planning to Provide Continuity

Where I live in Louisiana, we have been hearing a little more about emergency preparedness than normal lately with the start of hurricane season on June 1 fast approaching. Then this morning, I noticed that the week of May 16-20, 2016 has been designated as Business Continuity Awareness Week. A lot of the focus of the emergency management community prior to hurricane season is on trying to get the public to prepare itself and rightly so. During the first 48-72 hours after a hurricane, people should be prepared to take care of themselves. So how does this tie to Business Continuity? In two important ways at least.

First, the public sector version of Business Continuity Planning (BCP) is Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP). Governments develop COOP plans to help reduce or prevent the risk of critical government services and functions going offline in a disaster. For those risks that can’t be prevented, COOP planning prioritizes those services and functions and seeks to minimize the time it takes to recover them if they go offline. The faster governments can recover, the faster they can resume providing day to day services to their citizens/customers, respond to their emergency needs and support their recovery from disaster.  Being able to do those things helps a community get back to “normal” faster.

Second, having businesses recover and reopen after disasters is equally, if not more important, than having government operations return to functionality quickly. This is pretty obvious, but not something a lot of business owners, particularly small business owners, give a lot of thought to. They should and this is a good time of year to remind them. A significant percentage of small businesses never reopen after a major disaster. Those who have done some business continuity planning stand a far greater chance of surviving and reopening. We need those businesses to recover for obvious reasons. We need to be able to go to the bank again, to the grocery store, to the gas station, to the hospitals and pharmacies shortly after a disaster. As soon as we get our families taken care of, we need to be able to go back to work.

So, do yourself a favor this week. If you run a business or a government department and don’t have a good BCP or COOP, make plans to get one in place soon. If you have a BCP already, pull it out and look at it to see if it’s a good plan. A good plan is based on a thorough and realistic hazard and risk assessment, identifies and prioritizes your business essential functions in order of importance, is coordinated with your internal IT department and external suppliers, and has been trained and exercised. Next ask yourself if you and your family are prepared at home with a disaster kit. Get one together if you need to. You will be helping to make your community more ready and your family safer, something you can feel good about.

 

AuthorGary Scronce, Director of Preparedness Programs