Has Keanu Reeves resurrected the Matrix movie ? Well we believe our BCM next has resurrected the BIA Matrix.
Business continuity programs have a core requirement. It needs businesses to identify their crown jewels. The assets that need to be recovered at all costs with limited resources at hand. This critical quantification is a key success factor for Business Continuity Plans to work in times of Crisis
Enabling this evaluation in a quantified manner is Business Impact Analysis.
It helps in identifying essential business operations and predicting the effects of disruption. It further assists the business continuity team to collect data to help build recovery tactics and restrict financial loss.
As an effective process that defines binary outcomes. It requires an algorithm or a guideline that sets the rules for the classification of a process as critical or noncritical during times of a crisis.
This set of rules is termed a Business Impact Analysis matrix.
The matrix generally enables classification of criticality across financial, operational, strategic, legal, reputational, and safety parameters. The parameters are usually derived from organizational risk appetite or minimum business continuity objectives.
They harp on questions such as how much revenue loss can we manage to absorb, is being broadcasted negatively in state media an issue, or do we act on issues concerned with national media alone?
The BIA matrix is predominantly a 3x3 or 5x5 matrix. If the grid is 3x3, the likelihood and impact scales will be Low, Medium, and High. If it's a 5x5, the more granular descriptors for both probability and impact will be: Very Low, Low, Medium, High, and Very High. Within each cell, there will be descriptions. Probability can be classified as rare, unlikely, moderate, likely, or highly likely along the axis. You can use terms like trivial, minor, moderate, significant, and extreme to describe the impact.
As beneficial as it is, the matrices of today's businesses tend to get unused or defunct in a medium to a short period.
The primary cause being the lack of controls to maintain the relevance of the classification to the threats faced by the business. For eg- businesses that have had a delay in budget approvals could have a smaller threshold in comparison to the previous term.
In the world of social media, any reputation impact is beyond just local impact, thereby needing more granular classification and dynamic monitoring and updates to the matrix.
With the lack of such dynamism, the matrix tends to loose its relevance and begins to loose buy in from end users and other critical stakeholders.
In BCM next, we have resolved this conundrum. Our business impact analyses are dynamically connected to the matrix. Any change in the matrix flags the impact changes in the process RTO's.
The BCM manager defines the matrix and manages the relevance of the matrix and appetite by seeking regular approvals from the CEO or the leader of the program.
Changes in budgets or operation goals? No problems, the appetite can be updated in real-time and our AI will reflect the updates across the BIA outcomes, risks, strategies, and business continuity plans.
Get started now and ask us more on how to nextify your business continuity capabilities.
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