Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
Business processes (and functions / activities) may be considered critical if the failure to perform them results in unacceptable damage to the organization or where legal regulation dictates they be treated as critical. Assessments of levels and types of damage vary between industry sectors but may include Financial, Legal, Reputation and Environmental.
The Business Impact Analysis module in Factonomy BCM is designed to reduce the time and effort required to collect Risk and Business Impact Analysis data within your organization, so that your business continuity management team can make appropriate decisions.
The BIA module gathers all of the information about specific business units, the functions they perform and the resources required to maintain operations. It includes the ability to map inter-function dependencies in addition to capturing data about applications, critical staff, recovery location and the measures of impact including financial, reputational and regulatory.
When used in conjunction with the planning and disaster recovery modules, users can map the business interruption event against the capabilities reported by I.T. This enables discrepancies to be addressed, improving resilience.
The module provides configurable risk analysis questionnaires, intuitive risk assessment processes and business impact analysis tools. Each element can be configured to suit an organization’s specific business processes, ensuring delivery of timely, accurate and appropriate information to the executive management team.
One of the key objectives of the BIA module is to aid stakeholders when ranking the importance of different business units and functions and to then direct appropriate levels of resource and the provision of failover and resilience services that support operations. A notable by-product of this process can be the discovery of expenditure on systems and processes that are unconnected with critical business activity and the cost savings available in decommissioning such systems.
Factonomy BIA allows entire BIA’s to vary organizational hierarchy if desired. Questions can be automatically controlled at regional, divisional levels right down to function level.
The process of capturing impact analysis data can greatly assist organizations when setting the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - being respectively; the acceptable latency of data that will be recovered and the acceptable amount of time to restore the business operation.
The BIA Wizard
Wizard interfaces, governed by workflow collect information from your organization. This removes the need to use spreadsheets to gather and collate information and saves time for your organization and your team. Wizards are much simpler for users to work with than traditional, application interfaces and significantly reduce the time and effort required to collect accurate data.
Once the process of regular data capture and update is established, it is possible to add to the collection task and increase the depth of the business process inventory and the associated risk profiles attached to it.
