Student blog by Heli Guerfi*
The main purpose of Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) is to increase organizational resilience and ensure the continuity of critical business functions before, during, and after disruptions (ISO 22301:2019). Disruptions can be resulted from various unwanted events, such as emergencies, crises, or any other incidents that just happen to mess up our plans.
As an example, some years ago there was a fire in a block of flats in Espoo. Luckily, there were no fatalities, but several people lost their homes, including all their possessions. Because of the incident, an entrepreneur with her employees lost their facilities and incomes for a very long time after which I also had to find a new hairdresser – a task that usually requires some level of dedication, as most of us probably know.
Of course, I admit that me having to find a new hairdresser was definitely not the most significant loss related to the incident. But we can think about the situation further in more general terms. What if several or even a majority of the old customers would not choose to come back when the hairdresser got her business running again? This is the point where we should start to discuss about Business Continuity Management. Naturally, these considerations should take a place proactively in the name of efficient business continuity planning.
When it comes to state and municipal authorities, they do have statutory duty to plan and implement continuity management measures. But, in enterprises, Business Continuity Management is usually based on voluntary activity. (National Emergency Supply of Agency, 2020.) There is no doubt that effective business continuity planning can be assumed to bring remarkable societal benefits.
The question is, should Business Continuity Management be more often statutory for economic life as well, at least to some extent? Indeed, it seems like creeping crises like the COVID-19 pandemic makes issues related to continuity management even more important for business communities in the future.
We live in a complex world that keeps surprising us constantly and in multiple ways. In the literature, organizational flexibility and resilience, that is, the ability to adapt to changes and to tackle more or less sudden disruptions, is already considered as an almost self-evident virtue, although there are different schools of thought on the topic. Nonetheless, in practice, Business Continuity Management can still be seen as an excessive activity without quick rewards. Legal obligations would not necessarily ensure the quality of Business Continuity Management plans.
That said, in many organizations they might end up providing company for lonely and dusty emergency response plans. On the other hand, legally based requirements would provide principal and practical support for the planning and implementing Business Continuity Management, a preparedness measure that clearly still needs to earn some justification for its existence.
After all, leading change in complex environments packed up with wicked problems is a collective effort (Ropo, 2019: 347). National Emergency Supply Agency (NESA) is cooperating with the different sectors and pools of the National Emergency Supply Organization (NESO) to serve the interests of both society and business life (NESA, 2019). It is another question whether those cooperative actions are wide and visible enough. Thus, the invitations to our mutual Business Continuity Management party might include the part of mandatory participation – even if the dress-code allows variations.
* This student blog post has been done as part of the course SAFER.SG.310 Societal Security: Contemporary Challenges in the Masters Degree Programme in Security and Safety Management (SAFER).
References
Overview of Security of Supply. National Emergency Supply of Agency. Retrieved 25.10.2020 from https://www.nesa.fi/security-of-supply/overview/.
Ropo, Arja. (2019). “Leadership for Change: How Did We Get There and Where Do We Go From Here?”, in Kangas, Anni et al. (eds.), Leading Change in a Complex World: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Tampere University Press.
Security and resilience. Business continuity management systems. Requirements (ISO 22301:2019).
