Think about the course you take in completing any type of process. You follow required steps that eventually lead to a desired finished product.

Take baking a cake for instance. Would it make sense to take the time to gather the ingredients listed on the recipe…then just decide to wing it without following any instruction? Or what if you gathered the materials to build your dream house only to throw away the blueprints?

These two scenarios, although exaggerated, are similar to how many people conduct Business Impact Analyses (BIA). To perform the important work you do as a business continuity planner, it’s imperative to fully utilize a BIA’s potential and understand what that “A” stands for…analysis.

“The purpose of a BIA is far more than just to collect information such as addresses, data, equipment or resource information,” explained Brian Turley, CEO of Strohl Systems. “It’s performed to identify the financial and operational implications of a business interruption and present findings in a way that helps you decide where planning efforts should be focused and budget money should be spent when developing your plans.”

BIA Professional^®, Strohl’s survey tool, guides plan builders through the important processes of survey design and data organization. But more than that, it provides the means to completely analyze results through reports. Its analytical capabilities are a result of the provided questions and templates derived from expert methodology. With these, you’ll collect the most vital information needed to survive a disruption, thus adding tremendous value to your continuity program.

Effective Tools = Effective Surveys
More and more, false claims are made that because one tool can import data from another that they are integrated. The difference between importing and integration is the strategic planning power and control integration provides plan builders. A tool that not only helps you gather your plan’s information in an automated format but also dissect it completely to utilize every bit you need is imperative. BIA Professional accomplishes this with reports.

“One of the most important elements of BIA Professional is its reporting ability,” said Al Sawchak, Strohl senior consultant. “Consider all the information you can accumulate in a very short time with a BIA. After 100 or even fewer completed surveys, you could have an overwhelming amount of data. What BIA Professional enables plan builders do is to pick and choose any specific bit of information that fits your descriptors.”

For example, if you’d like to see every business unit that answered “yes” to any random question and lives within five blocks of a satellite location of your organization and has the capability to work remotely at any moment – with BIA Professional, it’s easy. This provides the ability to make very strategic decisions based on the information you’ve gathered which beats taking a best guess anytime.

Creating and Recreating Methodologies
A big part of today’s progressive planning methodologies begin with utilizing a BIA survey to its maximum potential. “Over the years I’ve seen plan builders develop some very sophisticated and constructive methodologies in building BIA surveys,” said Sawchak. “For instance, a BIA can be a type of testing tool used to validate countless functions found in a business continuity plan. Recently I worked with a client that wished to assess the accuracy of their supply chain. All that was necessary was a survey aimed at validating vendor contact information in addition to specific questions aimed at their own business continuity readiness, which of course would potentially affect my client’s operation.”

Other ways a BIA can validate plans in efforts to lower an RTO (Recovery Time Objective) include performing an IT response tracking survey to evaluate Desktop support response time, and of course, updating employee contact information. There are also Operational Risk Assessment surveys that gather data used to rate vulnerabilities across an enterprise. All this information can then be fed into a planning tool where it can be integrated and become very useful in developing strategies.

Survey Says: Spend Money Here and Not There
A BIA can play a significant role in making key financial decisions. Let’s say for example that your survey’s results boil down to a loss of $300,000 per every day of your business’s work interruption. Would you find it necessary to purchase a $5 million per day mirroring solution? Of course not. However, if that loss is more in the area of $20 million per day, you’ll definitely want to consider spending the money to fully back up systems and have mirrored site.

And you might be surprised at what a survey reveals regarding how much financial support each business unit requires to function in a recovery situation. Some may not require as much as first thought; others may not have significant losses at first, but have the potential for quickly escalating costs over time.

Discovering the Keys to Continuity
A continuity planner understands the importance of identifying key dependencies within your business – whether internal (such as an application or piece of equipment) or external (such as a service your business depends on from outside vendors). With an effective survey, consequences of a failed dependency and how it will affect recovery efforts will easily be exposed. “A BIA can prevent a dreaded domino effect during a disruption…this depends on this and this on this and so on,” explained Turley.

“If one has significant trouble during a crisis, the potential to touch many other dependencies is certainly real. Simple survey questions that get to the root of the relationships of each could be an invaluable piece to a continuity plan.”

And since an RTO is all about the essence of time, a survey will give a plan a proper order of priorities. “You need to know what step comes first, second, third, etc. and a good idea on the timeframe for each,” said Sawchak. “If you have a call center that must be available 24/7 no matter what, a survey would obviously indicate a very high priority. And then there might be some surprises – a business unit that may be relatively important during normal instances might able to be out of commission for an extended amount of time without having a major impact on an organization. That’s the strength of a BIA – getting down to the facts using them to build and maintain the best possible continuity program for your organization.”

A house is only as good as its foundation and a continuity program is only as good as its information. To be prepared if the worst should ever occur to your organization, you need to activate a plan stocked with information that is able to offer its full potential. It’s often all right there for the taking – but is your survey tool capable of giving you the cake and letting you eat it too?

For more information on how BIA Professional can assist your organization, contact Strohl Systems at 800-634-2016, +1-610-768-4120 or info@strohlsystems.com.