Business Continuity Planning

When we think of business continuity planning, we often think of natural disasters and security related disasters. But no business can continue operations without access to energy; primarily electricity and gasoline.

And in this climate where the energy paradigm is changing, and in many instances uncertain, thinking about energy continuity planning is essential to the long term survival of your business.

Let’s look at some of the risks …

1. Blackouts and Rolling Brownouts

Concerns have heightened since the rolling brownouts in California in 2000 and 2001, and the Northeast blackout in 2003. These kinds of events are the worry of every major city now as they battle to find more electricity to deliver to more customers on a continually deteriorating power infrastructure.

Power regulators are trying to do more and more with less and less. And sudden demand events such as heat waves or freezing storms can push electrical grids to their limits very quickly. In many countries, blackouts and rolling brownouts are common.

2. Supply and Demand Dynamics

The cost of fuel and electricity rises due to the simple market dynamics of supply and demand. The rising cost of gasoline and diesel alone have put many businesses out of business, and hurt many more.

Conventional energy sources are fast becoming expensive enough to make many sources of alternative energy viable. But in the interim, significant supply disruptions could send prices skyrocketing as the only way to erode demand and create balance in the energy marketplace.

3. Regulated Conservation and Rationing

Along with supply and demand dynamics and the threat of blackouts or brownouts comes the threat of regulation. Many industrial countries such as China have used regulation to curtail their energy woes; for example, by only allowing manufacturing during the night, they allow the general service economy to run during the day.

Many ideas have also been proposed for rationing fuel as well; such as allowing vehicles with odd numbered license plates to run on odd numbered calendar days, and even numbered plates on even days.

Creating rolling brownouts is a quick, emergency solution to overtaxed electrical grids. But longer term solutions for energy shortages could involve regulated or forced conservation and rationing.

Building Your Energy Continuity Plan

As part of your overall business continuity plan, look at energy shortages, inflation, and loss as potential hazards. Then build a plan to mitigate and respond to these hazards. Some of the things to look at are …

• Reducing your energy consumption and requirements. The less energy you need to run your business, the less risk you face.
• Look at alternative energy sources; primarily renewables such as solar, wind, and biodiesel. The supply of alternative sources is growing, and being ready and capable of using those sources in a crisis situation can keep you up and running when others are scrambling.
• Build safety and backup sources of energy. These include UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), backup generators, and regular data backups in diverse locations. This can also include diversifying the regional locations of your business units.

A business continuity plan is a vital part of your business’s long term survival. And energy continuity is a vital part of that plan. And it becomes more so every day.

Creating a business continuity plan can be profitable for a company

Building awareness, contingencies, safeguards, and alternative options comes at a price. For most business owners and managers, shelling out the dollars to guard against something unseen and even uncertain is just counterproductive. In fact, it is counterintuitive to the basic human ‘flight or fight’ instinct which guards us against hazards – but only imminent hazards, happening in the here-and-now.

Business continuity and disaster recovery planning is a must for some companies. It is particularly prevalent in the IT (Information Technology) industry, and primarily for two reasons:

1. They store many critical computerized records (sometimes the personal information of thousands or millions of clients) that must be safeguarded and are invaluable to the business.
2. Customers expect instant-on access to networks. They must be up and running 24/7, and there is little tolerance for anything less.

How important is continuity and recovery planning for non-IT businesses? Every business is subject to industry and location specific threats, as well as random or outside events that can seriously harm it. Through risk analysis and cost / benefit analysis, the impact of various hazards can be measured and refined into a targeted plan that tackles specific high risk threats. This is essential for cost control.

But cost-control measures do not offer enough value for most business owners and managers. Business continuity planning needs to actively affect the bottom line – it needs to promote profitability.

The costs of a continuity plan or program need to be weighed and optimized against the financial gains that come with planning. Specifically:

1. Reducing insurance premiums. Insurers don’t mind high risk – if you’re willing to pay a high premium to insure against it. Reduce the risk and you reduce the premiums.
2. Good business-to-business relationships depend on dependability. If you can you ensure your customers and strategic partners that your business will stand strong through thick and thin, that makes you more valuable. And that’s worth giving you business, or more business, or higher priced business.
3. Proper business continuity does not involve ‘stocking up on supplies’ so much as it focuses on finding alternate suppliers. And there is something inherently profitable about this approach; it forces you to look at other purchasing or outsourcing options. Invariably, you can find someone else who is faster, cheaper, better quality … decreasing your general expenses of simply doing business.
4. Businesses are about people and continuity planning makes people better. It melds team-building with personal development. It gives your people more skills and makes them more capable all around. Better people make a better, more profitable business.
5. Of course, if disaster strikes, a company is better prepared with a plan than without one and if good planning can actually pay for itself, then having that plan when disaster strikes is like winning the lottery. If a company can survive a catastrophe while all around, the competition is crumbling, then the question is not can we afford to have a business continuity plan, but, can we afford not to.

To make good business sense and break through the cost barrier, business continuity and disaster recovery planning must promote profitability. It has to have a positive impact before a disaster strikes. It has to have a good ROI (Return on Investment) for companies to invest in it. The key is to control the size of the planning investment and maximize the returns during planning.

The power of digital documents in a digital world

A computer is like a hammer or any other tool. Its role is not to make our lives more complicated, but to make performing tasks faster, easier, and more cost effective. The key to harnessing this productivity is to bridge the real world with the digital world. This bridge is easily constructed with the increasing use of eBooks and eDocuments.

Let’s look at some of the ways digital documents get the job done:

1. Richer experience. Not just text and photos. Digital documents can carry audio clips, video clips, interactive applications, and links to related subjects and information.
2. Instant access and recall. Search capabilities today allow users to search for documents and through them. Look for a document by name or search through all your documents to find specific words or phrases in seconds – try doing that with a shelf full of books or a stack of boxes containing archived files.
3. Quick communication of complex ideas. Sent by email, posted on a private network, or accessed over the internet, communication of complex ideas is easy. Media rich presentations can be sent to select people in a working group or thousands of content subscribers.
4. Simple storage. Rows of shelves, filing cabinets and archive boxes are being replaced with MB, GB, and Terabytes of space on hard drives. That ‘I know I’ll need it as soon as I throw it out’ pile that clutters our desks and drawers never needs to go and never needs to take up any more space than a file folder on the computer screen.
5. Secure storage. Disasters happen. A fire can destroy all the real world books, documents, photos and other files that are irreplaceable to a business or individual. Digital documents can be backed-up offsite every week, every day, or even in real time, automatically, making recovery from a disaster possible and more probable than ever.

The content capability of digital documents is increasing with speech recognition and synthesis, full motion video, and interactive 3D modeling. Whether using Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, or any one of the numerous other software technologies available, digital documents allow us to experience, access, share, and safeguard more information than ever before.

Typewriters are a thing of the past. It may not be too long before paper documents of all kinds are also, only found in museums.

Key characteristics for forms that ease office workflow

In the office, forms fill our lives, and we spend our lives filling out forms. Forms organize our information. They convey the specific information needed to complete a specific task. They tell us who, what, where, when, and why. They tell us how and how much.

Well designed forms make all of this easier. And that translates into faster, cheaper, and more accurate workflow. Cumbersome forms are a burden. They slow down the workflow. They need to be ‘tackled’ rather than utilized. And they cost an organization time and money. A better strategy is to find or build better forms – after all, they are supposed to make things easier and more organized.

There are some key characteristics to good form design that help ease the office workflow. These things should be looked at when qualifying new forms for use in any office:

1. Forms should be well labeled and easily recognizable from one to the next. There is nothing worse than filling out the L-987654-01 when you were supposed to fill out the L-987654-03. Filling out the ‘Invoice’ instead of the ‘Sales Order’ is a lot simpler.
2. Forms need to be more functional than cute. Fancy color schemes and graphics look great on a computer screen or printed in color, but usually translate badly when faxed or photocopied. A form needs to do its job onscreen, attached to an email, printed in color, printed in black and white, faxed, re-faxed, photocopied, filled out with a pen – I think you get the idea.
3. Forms need to contain all the data required to perform their task, including data that helps to track down errors that occur in the real world. They should not contain any information that is commonly not required and simply clutters up the form.
4. Forms need a clear destination. In a large organization, a form should tell the user where it needs to go once it is filled out. Forms that are sent outside the company need to tell the user how and where to return them. Each copy of a form needs to specify where it should go, and if possible, should indicate where the other copies went.
5. Forms need to clearly identify areas that the user should not fill out using ‘for office use only’ or ‘do not fill in this section’. Those off-limits areas should be clearly separated from the areas that need to be filled out by the user.

Establishing some basic criteria for your forms such as the key points above will help you choose and design forms that get the job done efficiently. It’s also important to occasionally get feedback from users so that improvements can be made.

Above all, remember that forms are meant to make the tasks of collecting, organizing, and distributing information easier. That is its first priority.