Stephen Ibaraki, Chief Officer Strategic Relations presentation addresses: Global IT Best Practices for Financial Business Continuity Improvements.
Following are a number of interesting viewpoints from ICT professionals on Business Continuity and IT Trends.
Greg Lane, Chair IP3
"Many years ago I used to speak on DR now BCP. I had found some case law in the U.S. that found the IT manager responsible for IT disaster recovery planning responsible for the financial impact of a cable cut to the building. Even though he had told leadership in a presentation on disaster recovery of the risk and asked for funding to prevent impact. They turned down the funding request. He was found responsible because he did not argue strongly enough for the funding. He was uniquely qualified and did not try hard enough to make his case. DR is a very interesting topic. Who is responsible? Leaders or knowledge experts? It is like insurance; when you do some probability and impact analysis one may not like the answers. I suspect there are more options now though the same issues. My sense that it’s now the business executives who are ultimately accountable!
Kishore Swaminathan, Chief Scientist, Accenture
IT 2015
Cloud Computing - Where is the rain?
Stretch Goals
""Outsourcing as a way or reducing cost is an archaic concept."
Technology has blurred what's inside and what's outside a company, making the walls porous. (see attachment)
- "You are only as viable as your partners".
In an "everything as a service" world, business continuity crucially depends on your service partners' viability as a business" (if your product vendor goes belly up, you still have the product, but if your SaaS provider goes belly-up, you go down with them; the point is that the traditional way of squeezing your partners (which is what Detroit did and drove out a lot of smaller innovators in auto parts) is an old idea; in the service world, you want your partners to survive and thrive of you are to thrive.
- "Think ecology"
- related to the above, but new technologies like cloud will put inter-company business processes on steroids; you are as good as your ecology of partners (so choose partners wisely) - see my enclosure 2, the section on inter-company processes.
- "SLA will no longer mean Submissive Loser's Alliance"
- In a more archaic outsourcing context, SLA was a way of big companies to beat up smaller ones. Viable providers of services will be as big or bigger than you.
- "Business continuity is a double-edged sword"
- Whether it's business continuity in the IT sense or the purely business sense, there is an important trade-off you have to be aware of. If you are very careful in evaluating and responding to a threat, the less false alarms (good), but if it turns out to be a real threat, the less time you have to recover. Alternatively, if you respond to every perceived (security or business) threat, you'll have more false alarms, but you'll also have longer time to respond in case the threat is genuine. It's important to develop an "efficient frontier".
Leon Strous, Senior IT Auditor DNB (Netherlands Central Bank); President 2010-2013 International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)John Boufford, Past President, Canadian Information Processing Society
Stacey Cerniuk, President & CO, Annex Consulting Group
Bruce Cowper: Group Manager - Microsoft Trustworthy Computing
