Do You Understand Business Continuity Planning?

Also, no team would expect to succeed without practice. Can you imagine a football team just showing up on Sunday afternoon expecting the offense line would know their blocking assignments and the wide receivers would automatically know how to run their routes? Do you practice how to react and respond in the event on an emergency? Part of an effective BCP process is what we refer to as “table top exercises” where you emulate an actual disaster and go through the motions of what you would do, who would do what, who you would contact and how. The time to learn you don’t know how to do this well is not during an actual emergency!

Business continuity planning is more about restoring business operations than simply providing technology to your employees. As the old joke about Carnegie Hall goes, the way you get there is “Practice, practice, practice.”

About the Author

Larry Bonfante is CIO of the United States Tennis Association and founder of CIO Bench Coach, LLC, an executive coaching practice for IT executives. He is also author of Lessons in IT Transformation, published by John Wiley & Sons. He can be reached at Larry@
CIOBenchCoach.com.