Key Steps for a successful Business Impact Analysis

The cornerstone of a successful Business resilience capability lies with appropriate Business Impact analysis. Many organization fail in overcoming disasters due to having BCM strategy that is not driven by the organization needs and supported by well  orchestrated BIA process.

 The Key elements of a good BIA incorporates

1. Sponsorship at top Leadership
2. Inventing time o gain Knowledge of organization
3. Use tools such as organizational charts, interviews, questionnaires, data flow diagrams and BIA software to gather data necessary to analyze the potential impact of a disaster on the business. Designate each process as critical or non-critical to conducting business
4. Confirming findings with department managers or key personnel to ensure that what you have determined is accurate and realistic.
5. BIA findings should also  the executive management team approval and applied developing business recovery strategies

Key driver  of BIA is proper  the risk assessment phase, where relevant threats are identified.

The  BIA execution that involve following steps:

1. Determine mission/business processes and recovery criticality.      Mission/business processes supported by the system are identified and the impact of a system disruption to those processes is determined along with outage impacts and estimated downtime. The downtime should reflect the maximum that an organization can tolerate while still maintaining the mission. 
2. Identify resource requirements. Realistic recovery efforts require a thorough evaluation of the resources required to resume mission/business processes and related interdependencies as quickly as possible.  Examples of resources that should be identified include facilities, personnel, equipment, software, data files, system components, and vital records.
3. Identify recovery priorities for system resources. Based upon the results from the previous activities, system resources can more clearly be linked to critical mission/business processes. Priority levels can be established for sequencing recovery activities and resources.