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Business Impact Analysis is a key part of any oprganisations risk management and continuity planning, so let's not get too hung up about ERM, GRC etc here. The Advisa is a powerful tool to help all organisations.
Business Impact Analysis using Advisa
Objectives
The purpose of a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is to determine which processes or resources are most critical to an organisation. This is achieved by examining what would be the impact on the organisation if the process or resource was not available for a range of time spans, and viewed from a number of perspectives. For example: “What loss of income might the business suffer if this resource was totally inoperable for 4 hours?” Note that perspectives other than financial must be considered, such as legal obligations and customer confidence.
A separate exercise complementary to BIA is Risk Analysis / Assessment which examines the threats that might trigger a loss of the process or resource. By combining the results of these two exercises, an organisation is able to prioritise efforts to minimise the risks affecting its most critical resources.
BIA is an essential component therefore of the continuity and recovery plans of an organisation that protect its existence following disasters.
Advisa
Advisa is a flexible web-based program for gathering, storing and managing information, that may be rapidly customised to create management systems specific to the needs of an organisation. It can be used to support ISO standards-compliant management systems in areas such as:
• ISO 9001 Quality Management
• ISO 14001 Environmental Systems
• OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health & Safety
• BS 25999-2 Business Continuity Management Systems
These tools can be integrated within an enterprise-wide management and business improvement balanced scorecard that consolidates strategic objectives, policies and development activities together with compliance audits, record keeping and awareness education.
ADVISA can involve employees at all levels in the gathering of risk data, thus helping embed the risk management ethos throughout the organisation.
How does ADVISA address the BIA Process?
Step 1: Determine User Groups
Within an organisation, users fall into groups that relate to their roles and responsibilities. We use these User Groups to control the rights to create, edit, manage and view data within the system. Our prime interest in BIA is the Process Owners who will understand the resources they manage:
Creation of the User Groups in ADFVISA is a once-off step that is performed by an administrator.
Step 2: Define the system Users, the roles they perform and their membership of User Groups.
Like step 1 this is a once-off step that is performed by an administrator. To simplify the process we can provide Excel workbooks that can be loaded directly into Advisa:
Step 3: Create questionnaires for each process.
In this step, you identify the process owners who are best placed to identify the critical processes in the business. Within the program this translates to creating an empty questionnaire for each process, and assigning a user to complete the questionnaire. The program helps the process by allowing you to generate one questionnaire for every member of the (Process Owners) group, however you may need to manually create more than one questionnaire for different users.
You can broadcast an email to all the users. The emails can contain any information, instructions, and attachments that you wish. In addition the program adds a link directly to the questionnaire, so the recipient of the email simply needs to click on the hyperlink and then complete the details of the questionnaire.
And to make life easier for you, we can provide a shortcut tool to facilitate setting up the details of this survey.
The ADVISA then enables users to identify and examine
- each of their various processes
- their critical resources
- their critical processes
to quantify the impact of losing any of these for different legths of time on areas such as
- loss of revenue
- service degradation
- legal risks
- market consequences
- employee morale
- business continuity plans.
Contact us if you think that ADVISA might be of help to you.
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