Is everyone in your organization aware of business resiliency (BR)? Do you want to deepen your own knowledge? May 13th–17th is this year’s Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW), facilitated by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI), and it presents a great opportunity to work on both.
Organization-wide: The main purpose of BCAW is to take the business resiliency message to the streets—or at least the hallways of your organization. Time spent doing this can have high returns, since the most common problem reported by business resiliency programs is lack of buy-in and engagement from leadership and employees. Your imagination is the limit on how to accomplish this, but here are some suggestions:
- Posters: Hang posters in high-visibility locations. Download free-to-use posters, or make your own.
- Information booths: Many organizations set up displays in foyers, cafeterias, and other congregation spaces, often coupled with contests, giveaways, and calls to action to get the word out.
- Slide decks/videos: These can be shared on intranets, email, and social media, or played on public display screens. Here’s a video that can be shared.
- Invite key folks to join you in viewing a webinar: BCI is hosting a series of webinars relating to the theme of Investing in Resilience throughout the week, which will help educate and demonstrate industry-wide perspectives. Check out the schedule.
- Social media: BCI will run social media activities throughout BCAW, which you can re-share or participate in at @thebceye using the hashtag #BCAW2019.
- Share documentation: Are your business resiliency plans readily available to others within your organization? Now’s a great opportunity to share them again and invite feedback from your colleagues.
IT and other business resiliency practitioners: For many of us, especially those who are not full-time business resiliency practitioners, Business Continuity Awareness Week is an excellent time to reflect on our own BR programs and capabilities, and work on making them better. Opportunities include:
- BCAW webinars: The same webinar series mentioned above is also an excellent resource for deepening your own knowledge and learning about industry trends.
- Getting insights from your users: Especially if you’re running an organization-wide program as described above, you can make it an opportunity to have discussions with your key business leaders and users, not only to educate them, but also to get feedback about your BCDR program and their needs.
- Getting involved in the wider community: If you’re not already, plugging in to organizations such as BCI to both give and receive thoughts on business resiliency with your peers can be a great resource, especially with other BR professionals who are in the same mindset via also observing the BCAW.
- Reaching out to a trusted advisor: While it’s in the front of your mind, this is a great time to see how your trusted partners for IT solutions and services can help enhance your business resiliency.
As we all see in other areas, an awareness week can be a great tool to advance a cause. Seize the opportunity to leverage Business Continuity Awareness Week to advance your own business resiliency goals.
To learn more about business resiliency planning and why it is important, reach out to an Account Manager today!
Rudy Rumohr
Rudy Rumohr is a Sr. Systems Engineer at Connection with more than 32 years of experience in IT management; business continuity and disaster recovery; data center, systems, and storage design and management; virtualization; enterprise architecture; and pharmaceutical IT. He holds several professional certifications, such as Nutanix Platform Professional AOS5 (NPP5), VMware Certified Associate—Digital Business Transformation, TOGAF 9, and ITIL v3 Foundation. When he’s not sharing his IT expertise, Rudy enjoys making music: playing guitar, bass, drums, and singing.
