In my concluding blog summarising the results of Marsh’s recently published Business Continuity benchmark report, it struck me that half of those companies surveyed had experienced an incident leading to loss of business.
11% of those companies have had more than one incident.
The most common incident to affect companies was fire and explosion (15%), followed by supplier failure (13%). IT failure came third.
Surprisingly the only driver which has increased over the past two years for Business Continuity is competitive advantage with past experiences, best practice, regulatory compliance, shareholder pressure, client pressure, and insurer pressure all going down. Marsh concludes that this is due to the new nature of BCM being part of core business strategy and that there are fewer drivers needed to rase its importance. The competitive advantage driver appears to confirm this view.
The three biggest barriers to BCM were as follows: conflicting priorities (34%), a lack of time (30%) and a lack of resources (29%)
With this information it’s clear to see that the role of Business Continuity Management has changed over the last 2 years and has become more integrated into core business strategy, which is encouraging to see. Lets just hope that within that remit, telecoms continuity is as important as it should be.
