Once upon a time there was a Chief Executive called Ebenezer. He disliked spending money at the best of times. When it came to business continuity, he could only see the cost and no payback, so he was unwilling to spend anything on it if he could possibly avoid it.

One Christmas he was visited by three very strange characters.

The ghost of business continuity past told him that in the olden days business continuity was called disaster recovery and was mainly about computers and huge catastrophic incidents. “We don’t have disasters here” he’d always thought, “it couldn’t happen to us”.

The ghost of business continuity present showed him that nowadays business continuity management encompasses all key business activities and their critical dependencies, not just IT; that it includes understanding and mitigating risks to those dependencies, such as monitoring and managing the supply chain and improving processes to increase resilience and reduce the likelihood or impact of disruption. It also reminded him of a number of recent disruptive events, including, though by no means limited to, the global pandemic, which had affected an awful lot of organisations who thought it couldn’t happen to them.

Then the ghost of business continuity future explained that the latest buzzword is resilience, of which business continuity management is a major component (whichever of the various versions of resilience an organisation subscribes to); that increasing awareness and demands by customers, regulators, investors, insurers, auditors and other stakeholders means that resilience, and therefore business continuity, is a board-level issue for many organisations; that the successful ones will be those who embed business continuity management as just one of a raft of resilience measures and join the dots between the various associated disciplines; and that it can no longer be thought of as merely an unnecessary expense and an optional extra.

Ebenezer found this to be a real eye-opener and resolved to give more consideration to business continuity management in future.

Merry Christmas!