Quantifying the loss of critical resources is one of the most undeveloped areas of business continuity management, according to one of the biggest providers of IT business continuity services in Australia.

Les Forest, Hewlett Packard’s business manager for business continuity in Australia and New Zealand, says it is fair to say that scenario-based planning for business continuity management is not their primary focus when advising clients.

“We don’t spend a lot of time at the front end of our consulting work trying to trawl through every type of disaster scenario or human-induced outage or situation,” he said.

“We focus very much on what resources each organisation has in-house and what it doesn’t and what it needs to supplement.”

But actually understanding what the cost of losing those critical aspects of the business are likely to be – and using that as a primary indicator of how critical that part of the business is – was particularly lacking, he said.

“This is an area where we see a lot of room for improvement in terms of quantifying the impact of different parts of the business structure being unavailable,”Forest said.

“So what if the floor or the building where your call centre staff are located cannot be populated for that day because of some building issue? [How do you] quantify that in terms of loss of business from a sales point of view, [or] quantify it if an order-processing application cannot operate?”

As part of that equation, it might be worth trying to forecast how many customers the business might lose if certain parts of the business weren’t operating, he added.

The reason that costing loss of resources hadn’t been done well, he said, was in part due to the difficulty of “getting airtime” with different stakeholders in the business. “Some of these exercises are driven by the IT fraternity, in which case it may not be seen as holistically as business managers view it. This is where we get called on sometimes to help … to bring all stakeholders to the table.”

HP will conduct a pandemic simulation at the Risk Management conference being held at the Sydney Harbour Marriot from 28–31 July. See here www.lexisnexis.com.au/Risk2008 for details