IT calls the shots

Does business continuity now play second fiddle to IT recovery?

Jim Preen

Once again the big tech companies set the pace in 2011 and despite the passing of Steve Jobs, which apparently most people learnt about on one of his devices, Apple seemed to go from strength to strength - this year it became the world’s most valuable corporation.

Google, Amazon and Facebook also bucked the recessionary trend, but it wasn’t all been good news for technology companies. Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian firm that manufactures Blackberry smart phones provided a gift for headline writers when their handsets failed to work for days on end.

As the Blackberry crumbled their customers vented their frustration on Twitter: ‘You realise that sending a letter in a bottle and putting it in the Thames is more reliable than a BlackBerry’ tweeted one irate user and almost inevitably: ‘What did one BlackBerry user say to the other BlackBerry user? Nothing.’

The blackout couldn’t have come at a worse time for RIM, which has lost market share to other smart phone rivals. Their response seemed slow and lacklustre and led to the company's stock dropping 20% (£1.9billion) in value.

At about the same time this was happening, research released showed that the vast majority of business continuity plan invocations occurred because of IT problems. It was claimed that hardware failure or infrastructure loss was fifteen times more likely to prompt invocation than more eye catching or news worthy events such as fire or flood.

So is the world of business continuity now dominated by IT recovery? Has technology become so central to our lives that business continuity has become just a footnote to getting computers up and running and staff back on-line?

Clearly IT recovery for a company such as RIM is of paramount importance without their IT functioning correctly they literally have nothing to offer their customers. No IT, no company.

But for other organisations that use IT but don’t offer it as part of their services, the slavish pursuit of IT and data recovery at the expense of other elements of business continuity can be misplaced.

It can be argued we’ve become too focused on continuity and recovery and forgotten about the most important preceding word: business. In any business continuity plan, the core business of a company must be central to its production, maintenance, and testing. While IT may be one of the key components in any recovery, those components must be business driven.

Ken Schroeder a US BC professional says: “Many businesses opened their door following Katrina with no IT support at all. Old fashioned slips of paper recorded transactions until the IT infrastructure was recovered, but the businesses supported their customers, maybe not at 100% immediately, but they didn't sit back and wait for everything to be in place before opening their doors”.

Those in IT sometimes tend to have an over-inflated idea of their importance coupled with the (often justifiable) knowledge that those outside IT simply don’t understand the technology involved. Their natural inclination is to ring-fence their area of expertise. This is something many departments may be guilty of, but it puts IT in a strong position because we all need what they do, we just don’t understand how they do it!

IT departments naturally want to protect themselves from being unjustly blamed when things do go wrong. These days if we can’t get on line or access data at the stroke of a key we are immediately on to IT demanding answers.

The other factor that comes into play with the Business versus IT issue is the cost of recovery. It’s easy for a department to demand a particular IT function right away, but we often have little idea as to what is required to accomplish that demand and how much it’s going to cost.

There really shouldn't be a conflict between IT and business continuity. IT recovery should be part of the overall business recovery strategy. A BCP is the entire recovery of a business. IT recovery is a component, albeit a very important component, of the over-arching plan.

Because business often doesn’t understand IT and vice versa there is a temptation for both to work in a vacuum. Suits and nerds need to talk constantly and disclose costs and concerns and in the spirit of the New Year learn to love each other a little more!