The best directors are increasingly seeing the advantages of designing a business continuity management system as a way of enhancing their competitive advantage and assuring shareholders of their ability to meet contractual obligations. With business disruptions routinely dominating in the press, isn't it time that your business joined them?

Business Continuity has emerged in the last 6 years as an essential part of good management for charitable and blue-chip companies of all shapes and sizes.

More and more we are observing large, established companies go out of business because they have failed to anticipate and plan for large-scale disruption and damage. So what can business owners and directors do to guarantee their firm survives in these difficult market conditions?

The good news is that there are both business continuity solutions and professionals available to help business owners defend their enterprise from the many and varied hazards and threats they face; but in what order do you start?

Most organizations find that it's best to decide as a board that business continuity is important to your organization and then put some cash behind that decision.

With funding agreed, you should set-out a timescale for upgrading your organization's resilience to disruptions and communicate the scope of products and services that the business continuity programme will cover to help orientate the team that you appoint to develop your business continuity policies, strategies and plans.

If you haven't got business continuity expertise at hand, you probably ought to seek recommendations from peers and colleagues regarding suitable providers with a proven track record in the development and delivery of business continuity management services for organizations of your size.

With your team in place, you'll need to get started by identifying your most vital products and services; the things that create most of your revenue or have the greatest impact if they are or are not delivered as agreed). Most organizations find that about 20% of services produce 80% of the benefits that accrue to the organization and those they serve so it's sensible to start with these initially.

Once these most important products and services are agreed the team needs to look at the people, facilities and processes that combine to deliver them; including the flow of raw materials, utilities, people, data and operational sites.

With the business processes mapped out for each vital product or service, you should identify vulnerabilities within those processes and work out how they would affect the quality of supply if they happened.

Once you understand where your business is exposed you can create draft strategies and plans to reduce the likelihood of those disruptions arising or their impact: for example if a service depends on availability of electrical power, you might install back up supplies from DC batteries or diesel generators.

The make-up and extent of the strategies and plans you agree will be determined by the significance of the product or service and your potential losses you may need to create disaster response plans first to mitigate against the loss whilst you work on developing the degree of resilience needed to prevent disruptions.

Sometimes you can considerably minimise the probable damage to your organization's critical activities by taking time to consider the "what-ifs" so it makes evident sense to do so; whether you are driven by legislation, competitive forces or plain common-sense.

Take action today, before life's vagaries make you wish you had not sat on the fence about putting a proper and effective business continuity management system in place.

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