Business continuity fails to convey its message

The risk management industry is failing to fully understand and successfully implement business continuity management (BCM) strategies, the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) has warned.

Speaking to StrategicRISK, the institute’s director Lyndon Bird (pictured) said the strategy is being misunderstood at senior level.

He said: “The business continuity community has not successfully articulated what it is and what it’s for over the years. It’s done less well than ERM in getting its message forward.”

This is one reason why in many companies the term ‘business continuity’ has been replaced by ‘resilience’.

Bird said: “The speed of this change is surprising me. A lot of people now have become ‘heads of resilience’, as opposed to ‘heads of business continuity’. When I’ve looked at what they do it is business continuity-plus, although it’s not really ‘plus’, it’s what they should have been doing anyway.

“This has happened to get the attention of the board because business continuity has been somehow mistakenly interpreted as just the same [thing] as recovery from specific threats being realised. Resilience is being seen as a positive way to adapt your organisation to deal with all sorts of threats that may happen and that’s why there has been this change of emphasis.”