ISO 22313 will provide more detailed guidance and should be published next year.  

Those who are already certified to BS25999-2 will be able to transistion to ISO 22301 and these arrangements will become clear shortly.  Those who are already going through certification to BS25999-2 will also be able to transition to ISO 22301, there is no need to re-start the process.

ISO 22301 covers much the same ground as BS25999 and requires that organizations develop a management system and undertake all of the conventional business continuity stages, including BIA, risk assessment, developing a strategy, implementing solutions and plans, exercising and testing.  There are some differences, it is more specific around warning and communication and dealing with the initial stages of incident response; and there is a need for performance metrics - i.e. measures to determine how effectively business continuity is being managed.

BS25999-2 will be withdrawn in November and the UK is adopting ISO22301 as its replacement.  Norway, Sweden, South Africa and Thailand have already announced that they are adopting it and we can expect to see more national standards bodies around the world adopting ISO22301 as their recognised standard.  As such, the influence of ISO 22301 will be world wide and represents a major step forward in imporving societal resilience.

This is a requirements standard and we anticipate that the audit bodies will already be preparing for its implementation and will soon offer accredited certification against the standard.  Those already certified to BS 25999-2 will have an opportunity to transition to the new standard but the details of this have still to be formally worked out.

ISO 22313 which provides guidance to ISO 22301 is currently at DIS stage and available for comments on the BSI web site or through your national standards body if outside the UK.

Our ISO 22301 training course is available!

On the UK TV programme, QI, we have recently seen the Honda developed robot Asimo which looks for all the world like a young boy in a space suit.  You may have seen it in the Honda advertising too.  We have also seen remarkably well featured and expressive faces although as yet, there is still some aspects that give away that this is not a real person.  You may also have seen the remarkable large fish like robots that fly and determine their relative positions. These are all fascinating and will lead to interesting practical application in the future.

However, a recent TED talk (see www.ted.com) given by Vijay Kumar is a whole new experience.  Here we see small flying robots, much like the flying helicopter toys so popular as gifts around Christmas, which determine their own flight paths and navigate from place to place by themselves.  What is particularly exciting is that one of the applications already in mind is that of entering into buildings to search for people following a disaster.  The robot can determine how to get into the building and gradually build a map of the building, it can search for people or it could build a picture of radiation levels in a damaged nuclear site, for instance.

The demonstration by Professor Kumar is worth a look so please go and check it out.  What is clear is that robots are coming, if not quite in the form we might have expected when we were reading Sci-Fi.

• Late May in Paris, Madrid and Barcelona
• May 9th in The Netherlands (Ede)
• September in the UK

I am sure that there are others but as I have been asked to speak at these, I thought it worthy of mentioning them.  I will provide more details as we have them.

ISO will also publish an article within the internal ISO magazine in order to publicise the new standard across the ISO organisation itself.  I am sure that other popular sources of information on business continuity will be publishing articles too.

As far as the FDIS is concerned, we have spotted a few minor quirks that need sorting out before final publication.  There are some rather oddly worded notes at the start of each section which are simply confusing and we will seek to have these removed and the pagination is a little strange in that some headings appear at the foot of the page rather than being kept with the relevant text.  These are minor points of administration and should not present any difficulty.

The FDIS still needs to be approved, but if it is, then publication will follow and so I would currently anticipate that the final version should be available in May of this year. 

Our larger offering is a new set of courses, organized as 10 modules and with study in between these modules where you can study in greater depth and apply what you have learned.  These courses take you through the basics of business continuity and then through the entire lifecycle, combining study with practical exercises.

We are trying to offer a different form of training to our attendees.  The training is not just in the class but is supported by mentoring and information sharing between modules.  Our aim is to impart knowledge and capability, you should emerge as a competent business continuity practitioner.  Too many courses are designed to cram information and then to take an exam for qualifications, but here we are aiming to produce competent people over a longer period with more in-depth support.

If this sounds interesting to you, please contact us.

I looked back at the Economist publication, “The World in 2011”, an annual which does have the good grace to review its own predictions retrospectively each year.  One of the biggest events of last year was the “Arab Spring”.  What did the forecasters have to say about this?

Tunisia is where the Arab Spring was born.  Tunisia did not feature at all in the magazine, including in the summary of countries and their prospects across North Africa.  Egypt would have elections for the succession of Mubarak which would pass on to his son, whilst Libya would remain under Gadhafi. Not one hint that there would be a massive uprising of popular sentiment and an overthrow of the regimes.

In Japan we have seen the terrible earthquake and tsunami and in Thailand widespread flooding, of course these were not predicted either.

So let us ponder 2012.  I predict that something unusual will happen that none of us can foresee. And that’s why we should plan for what are essentially unforeseen events that interrupt business and life in general, and not for a long series of specific scenarios which will never happen or at least, not in the way that you might predict.  Have a good 2012!