PLANNING ISSUES
Nat Forbes cre- ated quite a stir ecently with a thought-provok- ing blog post at calamity- prevention. com called
“Is the BCM Profession a
Dead-End?” He begins with
a dark but somewhat funny
characterization of the business
continuity professional as a lonely,
underappreciated, underfunded,
corporate pariah begging for
scraps at the edge of the organizational hierarchy. Worse yet, the
professional faces no discernable
career track, and no light at the
end of the tunnel.
According to Forbes, the problem is
that the BC professional cannot convince
upper management of his value because
his job is to prepare for the unlikely horrific
disaster. As he puts it, “It’s just difficult
to chart an upward career path for a guy
whose job is to plan for the Apocalypse if
asteroids never smash into the planet.”
But Forbes suggests a way out of this
dead-end road. He urges the BC profes-
sional -- and by implication the profession
-- to expand his duties into neighboring
fields from risk management (includ-
ing financial risk management) to cor-
porate security, disaster recovery, human
resources, facilities, and corporate com-
munications. His reasoning is that the
corporate world already recognizes the
value of these periphery fields. If the BC
professional is to establish his own value,
he should adopt these duties as his own.
This is not a new suggestion. A number
of commentators have predicted, or
encouraged, the convergence of business
continuity with fields that it intersects. For
instance, ASIS International has talked
about the convergence of business continuity with information security and physical security.
By JOHN ORLANDO, Ph.D.
The Answer?
While convergence between these fields
makes sense on a rhetorical level, does it
make sense on an organizational level?
Yes, the umbrella term “risk management”
can be divided into the subfields of financial risk and physical risk, but do those
two fields really share much in common
beyond the similar title? Financial risk
management seems very different from
physical risk management. Are the duties
and skill sets of the CFO who watches
the various markets to manage risk and
determine where best place to park an
organization’s assets really so similar to
those of the business continuity folks who
prepare to relocate functions in the event
of a disaster? The former is an accounting
function, while the latter requires a variety
of skills relating to organizing people and
systems.
No doubt the business continuity pro-
fessional is well-served to understand
periphery fields such as physical security
and the like. It is always helpful to under-
stand the duties of the people with whom
you must work to do your own job. In that
sense, it is helpful for the business conti-
nuity professional to understand the func-
tions of all jobs within an organization,
since she could be called upon to find
ways to reproduce those jobs at another
location. We study the fields of risk
management, IT continuity, and others
because that knowledge is an important
part of a business continuity profession-
al’s job.
Deeper, not Broader
Most importantly, it’s not clear that
the best strategy out of the profession’s
conundrum is to try to establish its value
