Are You Prepared For Disaster?

September 17, 2001

Can you say that your company has taken the necessary steps to ensure that business will continue in the event of a disaster? Recent events have heightened the awareness and the need to maintain vigilance upon the survivability of the business regardless of what unknown calamity may occur. The unimaginable causes one to reflect and reassess a business model and its ability to continue. How do you manage without key personnel? What if physical space is destroyed? What if the civic infrastructure is crippled?

The questions posed above are critical ones that need to be considered as part of an overall business planning process. The thought of losing the physical location, access to the location, services to the location, or portions of the employee base are seldom in the thoughts of those in charge. As distressful as it might be to make plans surrounding this issue, businesses that have planned for the unexpected, usually survived relatively unscathed with a viable business. While those who did not think disaster could happen to them suffered customer erosion and lost revenue that often could not be regained.

Call it disaster planning or business continuity, both terms mean the same thing. All businesses must identify critical business functions, identify the staff required to administer them and make the necessary plans to seamlessly transition business functionality in the advent of the unforeseen. A very simple concept, but one that few CLECs have in place.

The mantra of the CLEC is to gain market share through customer acquisition. It is the primary objective. To plan for an outage or natural disaster is nowhere in the business plan. Someone in IT might suggest or perform back-ups on major systems in order to restore databases if one should happen to crash, but the conscious effort to identify the business critical functions and what is required to manage them does not occur.

Why should you plan for a disaster? Unforeseen events occur every day of every year-tornadoes in the Midwest, earthquakes in the West, hurricanes in the South and fires everywhere are regular fodder for the news. We can do as much as possible to eliminate danger, but to bury one's head in the sand and believe it will never happen is foolhardy. Even in daily life, employees can be lost to accidents. Is the business prepared to deal with the loss of key individuals?

If you have to ask why your business has to plan for disaster, then ask yourself , why do I need insurance? You purchase insurance to protect your personnel and facility from financial loss in the event of a fire or injury. You can control some risk, but the unexpected is just that, unexpected. Insurance assists in what was physically lost, not the revenue lost as a result of the incident. This is a major consideration that many companies forget. While you can rebuild or replace assets, major revenue can be lost forever due to lost sales, inability to deliver, lost databases, and knowledge.

This is not to say a fatalistic approach needs to be undertaken, but the realization of reality and to assure the success of a business in the advent of a calamity, regardless of how widespread or severe the event may be. A common sense approach is required to look intently upon the operation and what/who is required in the event of a disaster.

The first step is to identify the critical functions within the business (for example, sales, provisioning, service or billing). And within these business functions, the most critical must have functions (for example, service-communications and personnel to answer customer calls and handle only the most serious inquiries). The purpose is to identify those critical tasks that must be accomplished to serve your customers. This could be reduced to service and billing as a minimum to ensure existing customers are properly taken care of.

Once you identify the critical business functions, then where do you locate them? It would not make sense to maintain your backup in the same physical location. You could have a hot site located some distance from your primary site, where the information to manage business functions is regularly updated and in the event of need, all functions could be immediately transferred and managed from that location.

You may have a back-up location where key employees would relocate and perform their tasks as if nothing happened. You could have a managed services contract, where vendors provide support until you are back on your feet, or a combination of all of the above. The key is to identify, prepare, and be able to implement the critical business tasks if the need may arise.
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Secondly, once you identify the critical business functions, what are the personnel requirements? In many ways this is a business critical task that must be performed regardless of whether the physical location is impacted. If your business relies upon one person to perform a critical task, what if that person is injured, out on vacation, or called-out for duty with the armed forces reserves? These are unplanned actions that affect employees every day. Do you have back-ups for critical tasks? How deep are they? Is there a back up for the back up?

I am a strong advocate of cross training of employees. Not only for the flexibility and knowledge growth it provides employees, but the capability to quickly migrate personnel into tasks whenever the need arises. In business critical areas, whether management or staff, the ability to handle more than one task is paramount. In the case of smaller companies, as many CLECs are, this becomes imperative. Now only should staff be able to handle more than one task, but management as well.

Lastly are communications. No matter which method of backup you employ, if you cannot communicate, then the backup is not successful. Customers expect to be able to reach you, even if it means going to a voicemail box that provides information on the status of the company. If the plan involves the transition to a back up facility, then communications must be set-up and tested on a regular basis to assure no changes have occurred which would impact a graceful transition to the backup location.

Think strongly about implementing a business continuity plan. The business you save could be your own.

Jim Marsh is a senior consultant for The Management Network Group, a telecom consulting organization.  Jim has worked in telecom for 15 years and is an expert in revenue assurance, risk management and fraud. Jim speaks and writes on improving operational systems and functions to improve bottom lines.