Standards News

The progression of the business continuity standard at ISO has stalled over a discussion about the inter-relationship with Organizational Resilience, a work in progress in the same ISO committee.  It is hoped that this will be resolved in Beijing during the early part of November and that the current document will therefore progress to FDIS (Final Draft International Standard) and subsequent full publication in the new year.

In the meantime, the UK has published PD25666 on Exercising and Testing.  Originally conceived as providing further guidance for business continuity, its remit widened slightly and it is now applicable for emergency management too.  It outlines an overall approach and since publication has proven highly popular, with sales far out-stripping expectations and becoming the largest selling PD ever.  A “PD” is a “Published Document” and as such is not a standard and is in a sense an even softer set of guidance than might be expected from a PAS (Publically Available Specification).

A forthcoming attraction from the same committee is PD25222 which relates to business continuity and the supply chain, a complex area.  The draft is being reviewed by the committee now and it looks like a very high quality piece of work.

It is also worth noting that PAS200 on Crisis Management has finally been published.  This is the first attempt to describe Crisis Management as a discrete discipline and it is therefore worthy of interest on that count alone.  Reception has been largely positive but not entirely so, it would be interesting to know how favourably it is being received.  Feedback is certainly needed as it may one day progress to a standard, as PAS56 laid the ground work for BS25999.

Disaster in Japan

Clearly the events in Japan have been a huge news story in the UK and around the world with the earthquake leading to a tsunami and then a major nuclear problem.  For an insight into the technical issues relating to the nuclear plants, I turned to the excellent Material World on BBC Radio 4 which devoted a whole programme to discussing the issues arising.

An interesting point raised early in the discussion of the piece is that nuclear power plants have a design life of 30 years or so and consequently the current disaster has impacted on plant designed many, many years ago.  The anaology of how we drove cars then without seat belts, air bags, crumple zones and without ABS braking is quite telling when one translates this to the nuclear power plants affected by the tsunami - clearly the damage and issues arising from these does not necessarily tell us very much about the potential safety of plants being designed and built today. Another plant of a different design at Onagawa has survived without problems, and people locally took refuge there as the safest place to be.

Boiling Water Reactors have not been built in the UK and the Gas Cooled principles that were followed do not have the same weaknesses, and nor do the Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) at Sizewell - which is good as this the closest to me now that Bradwell is being closed.

Nuclear power remains controversial - not least because the impact of a major incident can be so widespread, long term and deadly.  Two things contribute particularly to the unease - you cannot see the radiation and therefore avoid it, and the health impacts are difficult to understand and long term creating great anxiety.  Furthermore, the nuclear industry has a track record of secrecy, lying and cover up almost without comparison and therefore people mistrust what they are told.

In this case we have seen some of the best and worst of these responses.  The industry have been consistently over-optimistic that their efforts would contain and resolve the problems encountered - leading to the Government issuing communications along these lines only to find events contradicting them.  Unusually for Japan, the Prime Minister has now publicly criticised the power company for this and vented his frustration at being misled.  On the positive side, Japan understands the lessons of Chernobyl and has promptly issued Iodine tablets which prevents the uptake of radio-active isotopes into the body, as well as stopping the consumption of food from the affected areas.

A further complication with radiation is that measures of radiation means precious little to most people, and understanding the difference between micro-Sieverts, milli-Sieverts and Sieverts is not something that many people have a grasp of.  A really useful graphic has been produced which can currently be found at http://xkcd.com/radiation/ shed considerable light on this: the dose from Fukushima is not trivial but is considerably lower than safe limits and does not compare to Chernobyl in any way.

You can listen to the Material World podcast via this link http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/material

Business Continuity Awareness: Chief Executive Views

As this is Business Continuity Awareness Week 2011 I did not intend to post an entry as there are so many other communications vying for attention.  However, I was listening to my latest downloaded podcasts which includes the excellent Radio 4 programme, "The Bottom Line".  Hosted by Evan Davis this is a genial discussion on business topics with three senior executives and is always interesting.

This week proved to be of particular relevance as the opening discussion related to the headline events in Japan and led to an interesting discussion between the three executives.  Here we had Paul Moody, CEO of Britvic - you would know Robinson's, J2O, Tango as their leading brands but they are also the distributor for Pepsi and 7 Up; Guy Parsons of Travelodge who describes his business as an e-commerce web business which happens to specialise in hotel rooms, and Roeland Vos, CEO Starwood Hotels who number Sheraton, Le Meridien and W among their brands of luxury hotels.

Roeland speaks about the hotel in Sendai which is closed and their immediate focus being on their people, customers and staff, who were affected.  They have also be serving the many displaced people who needed food and accommodation. Evan then introduces the term "business continuity" and asks what these organisations plan for - and gets sensible, well informed answers.  Clearly business continuity is something that has penetrated to the top of these businesses.

Roeland then speaks about regular exercises and how these should be to prepare people to perform in whatever cicumstances they find themselves, and the importance of not simply preparing for specific scenarios.  

I highly recommend this, it is not ground breaking information but it is most interesting to hear management discussing business continuity, contingency planning, resilience and crisis management in such a well-informed way.  You can find the podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/bottomline 

Oprel training

Oprel will soon be offering a suite of public training to compliment our consultancy and in-house training. More soon.

PAS200 Crisis Management

A new document is in the pipeline to describe Crisis Management practice.  It is in its final draft and has been produced by a team working under the BSI's supervision and sponsored by the Cabinet Office.  Originally conceived by the Business Continuity Management committee to complement BS25999 it contains much good thinking but unfortunately distances itself from BCM in a way sure to confuse the market.  It currently fails to provide either a "how to" or a "what I should have" but often reads like an academic treatise, which is rather unfortunate as there are some sound ideas lost in the text.

Currently it is being reviewed and has been criticised from a number of quarters so it remains to be seen if the document will proceed to publication as intended or whether more consensus building and editing will be deemed to be required in order to provide a better document.