Case Study
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The software selection process
While software can offer a range of benefits to ease the pressure on 
BCM managers, choosing the right product for your continuity needs 
can be an arduous journey, explains Graham McKay
B
usiness continuity software can be a forward-looking CEO. At this juncture, I to fully understand the intricacies of the
great enabler for your organisation. was able to use real world examples of how requirements themselves as they related to
It can enable you to plan ahead, often in business continuity engagements the business.
identify and assess critical activities, and with other organisations, the plans quickly It was at this point that the group fully
determine the actions which you would take became obsolete due to changes in the appreciated that business continuity was the
during and beyond a business disruption. organisation’s personnel, structures or understanding of the organisation in both
When you consider the additional potential processes, explains Graham McKay whilst process and resource terms. From here on, it
benefits software can bring, such as the extolling the wider business benefits that was a constant battle with the project group
identification of supply chain dependencies, could be leveraged from investing in such to contain the project within its original
real time exercising and immediate alerting an enterprise-wide software solution. scope and not increase the development
to your incident personnel and stakeholders, Whilst that initial decision was entirely to become a business tool for much wider
its raison d’être is compelling. rational, I was wholly unaware of the application, whilst delivering a breadth of
My consultancy experience has taught subsequent effort in front of me to identify management information almost as a by
me that there can be significant advantages an appropriate solution. product of the business continuity process
to deploying a software tool to support the due to its relational connections across the
entire lifecycle of the business continuity Identifying the requirements business.
discipline. This extends from enabling, The next phase was to identify the
managing and embedding business requirements that the solution had to deliver Establishing the shortlist
continuity into an organisation through to against. We began this task by brainstorming Until this stage we had purposely avoided
incident management and post incident around the business and set up a project looking at the available options in the
restoration. However, with an ever group containing representatives across market as we wanted to provide a focus
increasing landscape of available products, both the geographies and functions of the to define our requirements and not be
the most important question is how do business. We then took all the output and influenced by the allure of shiny things.
you select the most appropriate software placed it in order of ‘must have’, ‘should Now we tested the market against our matrix
package for your particular business? have’ and ‘nice to have’. This then gave us of needs with a view to narrowing down the
the baseline that we could measure potential options and test driving a shortlist.
Making the business case candidates, against, whilst recognising When we started to look at the market,
When I took up my current position, one of that we had been quite challenging in the there were literally dozens of solution
the first actions was to initiate the process of requirements we had defined under the proclaiming to be business continuity
selecting a business continuity tool to meet ‘nice to have’ banner. software tools. By typing ‘business
the organisation’s needs and potentially that As the company had a history of continuity software’ into a search engine
of their broad client base. web development, I adopted their we generated a list of some 20,000 related
e
The initial phase was to justify to the methodologies to build a proof of concept websites. The results ranged from well
business the requirement to automate vehicle so we could fully understand known products, and some not so well
business continuity through a business our own requirements and demonstrate known; from those that were really only
case process. I understood the organisation to our stakeholders the value of the online backup solutions to enterprise-
and its culture, and therefore this was software proposal. The development of level platforms. Identifying the shortlist of
a reasonably straightforward process, the proof of concept took around three potential candidates consumed a significant
©iStockphoto.com/lorrainedark championed in no small measure by the months and allowed the project group resource in itself.
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