Business Continuity Benchmarking

Business Continuity Management, (BCM), though accepted as critical to sustainability of business can be difficult to assess, particularly with regards to how well an organisation is prepared.

Benchmarking all or part of an organisation’s BCM programme can provide management with valuable feed back on what has been achieved and, more importantly, where resources and effort need to be focused in order to embed BCM.

There have been a number of business continuity standards launched around the world in recent years, with the latest, BS 25999 part one, being released at the end of November 2006.

RMI utilises one of the leading benchmarking forum’s developed by the Business Continuity Institute, (of which RMI is a member) and INONI Ltd - BCI Benchmark. This is a powerful assessment tool through which RMI facilitates companies in benchmarking and measuring their business continuity plans and processes against the latest version of the BS 25999’s Good Practice Guidelines, (GPG). This allows benchmarking and evaluation against the broad principles contained in other international business continuity standards.

BCM Benchmarking has various unique aspects:

•     RMI qualifies all inputs in to the assessment.  By doing sample analysis of your organisation’s BCM data, (project charter, policies, business impact analysis, risks assessments, BC strategies, BC planning, maintenance, training, exercising, auditing), we ensure an accurate assessment is undertaken

•     The assessment provides an independent global perspective, allowing organisations to benchmark against the GPG with reference to each recognised international standard.

•     It provides expert analysis offering comparability and identification of improvements at detailed and strategic levels.

•     We will compare where the BCM programme stands in comparison to similar industry sectors as well as BCM nationally and regionally

•     The assessment’s inbuilt maturity model allows two levels of benchmarking dependent on how developed BCM is within the organisation.

•     RMI interpret the benchmarking review and provide a roadmap for improvement where required, allowing the benchmarking to deliver beyond just comparison

BCI Benchmark is powered by INONI, a proven diagnostic, benchmarking and measurement system which has been used extensively by the UK Financial Services Authority since 2005 for market-wide resilience benchmarking.

This report analyses RMI’s assessment of XXX’s[1] BCM policy development & implementation and is in three parts:

Part 1: A Red-Amber-Green (RAG) visual presentation indicating your organisation's overall performance in this area
Part 2: An analysis of the three key indicators, content, control and implementation for this discipline, explaining briefly the implications of each.
Part 3: A cross-analysis explaining what these scores mean, corresponding to your position relative to other regions.

Part 2

Assessment
STRONG CONTENT: You scored 7.00 for the BCM Policy Control parameter. In the case of XXX, BCM Policy has been interpreted through the Project Initiation Document, (PID), & Product Description, (PD), Documents.  Though Corporate, Business Unit and Unit BCM policies have yet to be independently extracted from the PID & PDs the required information is there to extract the Who, What and When for BCM Policy. This suggests that these policy-orientated documents provide strong material content for the business to measure and perform against, providing a good basis for assuring stakeholders' interests are upheld.

BORDERLINE CONTROL: Your score of 6.33 for the Content parameter suggests that BCM Policy provides some of the controls it requires to ensure governance takes place, although shortfalls could lead to the policy becoming misaligned with the business requirement. Extracting the Policy as an independent suite of signed off documents will clearly establish governance and commitment.

EFFECTIVE IMPLEMENTATION: You scored 7.00 for the Implementation parameter, suggesting that BCM Policy has been effectively implemented within the scope of this assessment.

Part 3

Figure 1 – Graph showing Regional Comparison for BCM Programme

Summary

Overall, the responses suggest a moderate level of policy compliance with best practice BCM standards with strong emphasis on implementation but slightly weaker content and control. This should be viewed positively and as a condition that invites ready improvement, backing up hands-on activities with the further consolidation of the underlying framework.

[1] This sample table uses real assessment data.  The organisation’s identity is removed for confidentiality.