What motivates companies to introduce business continuity planning?

I was prompted to write this blog post as a result of the discussion on my previous post “Are Business Continuity Plan Templates worth it?“. In my response to John Wade’s comment I mentioned maturity as an influencing factor in the decision to introduce business continuity management into a company and it got me thinking.

In my experience, businesses start to plan for business continuity for one of four reasons:

1. they are forced to by some regulatory or compliance requirement;
2. they have been told to by a key customer, or need to in order to bid for a new piece of work;
3. they, or somebody they know, has experienced an adverse incident; or
4. they see it as the right thing to do.

Type one companies are used to being regulated and business continuity is just one of things they “have” to do.

Type two companies are the sort I referred to in my earlier post and are the ones most likely to adopt a superficial approach to the subject to get the customer off their back or get the sale.

Type three companies tend to take the matter more seriously because they have seen at first hand what can go wrong and understand the impact of not having in place effective business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

Type four companies are the ones that take the matter most seriously. These companies tend to have the following characteristics:

• they are forward looking and therefore have a long term view of the future of the company;
• they understand that although they may have been lucky so far, eventually something serious will go wrong;
• they know that the long term survival of the company depends on having robust management systems; and
• they take the interests of their customers, investors and staff seriously and are prepared to implement measures that protect those interests.

There is nothing in this that implies these are big companies, just companies that take business seriously. I’ve known micro businesses that take business continuity seriously because they have a vision that extends for the next five years and they want to be sure they are still around in five years to get the reward. Equally, I know of large companies that pay scant regard to business continuity and rely on luck and the ability of their staff and management to think on their feet to survive when things go wrong.

What about you?

Looking at my analysis, what sort of business are you? If you already plan for resilience and continuity, why do you do it? I’d love to know.

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