A business impact analysis (BIA) is the foundation of developing a private sector preparedness (ps-preparedness) strategy and plan. The purpose of a BIA is to identify the effect of many different external and internal impacts upon the various parts of your organization in times of crisis. A BIA will show which parts of your organization will be most affected by an incident and what effect it will have upon your company as a whole. In other words, the BIA is used to establish which are the most critical business functions to your company's survival. Understanding these elements allows you to allocate resources wisely, to ensure ongoing operations even with unexpected events disrupting normal business processes. Each organization has hundreds of operations in its overall business, but only a percentage of these will be key to its survival, and it is these that you need to build business contingencies for. Of course, you cannot ignore the remainder, but because they are less critical, you can prepare recovery plans for them instead.
A business impact analysis is an analytic process that aims to reveal the business impacts that would result when a critical process exceeds its maximum allowable outage. Clas Consulting’s Consultants can lead your company through the BIA process.
Business impact analysis involves identifying the critical business functions within the organization and determining the impact of not performing the business function beyond the maximum acceptable outage. The types of criteria that can be used to evaluate the impact include: customer service; internal operations; legal/statutory and financial.
Effectively, we are looking to interview line, production, or function managers who are the middle management of the business. Often these are those that understand the objectives of the business but also have a good understanding of the operations they are responsible for. This is often an opportunity to sit down with all of the function heads of the organization. They are busy people so we make sure to take advantage of the time they give us. Our first meetings will be to provide them with the BIA questionnaire and provide them with an overview of the BIA and expectations, such as deadlines. We will discuss the BIA document and answer any questions that the team may have. At an agreed upon date will have follow-up interviews with each function head individually, to provide clarification of answers. Once all BIA documents are returned and follow-up interviews are complete, the results of the BIA will be evaluated and functions of the business prioritized. After initial prioritization, the team is often brought together one more time to discuss and agree upon the final priority list that will be submitted to senior management.