A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.
MHA Consulting
Brave New World: How MHA Consulting Can Help You Be Resilient in the Face of Todays Challenges
The last few years have been brutal for executives whose responsibilities include protecting their organizations. First came the simultaneous occurrence of a pandemic, social unrest, rising cybercrime, and extreme weather. Recently, the pandemic has eased but new problems have been added: supply chain snags, a shortage of workers, the war in Ukraine, and rising economic and food insecurity. Collectively, these developments pose serious threats to organizations’ ability to carry out their mission-critical operations, especially in our age of global supply chains and widespread outsourcing.
Meanwhile, the old belief that it was sufficient for an organization to be able to recover its key operations within hours of an outage is being replaced by a higher expectation. Increasingly, operations and systems need to be resilient, i.e., so robust they never go down.
Together, these developments have imposed a new burden on the people at the top of the organizations that make our economy, government, and society function. In most cases, this burden is not one they are eager to shoulder. (Their passion and skills lie elsewhere.) Fortunately, there are many business continuity firms out there whose consultants are dedicated to this work and have the expertise to perform it. MHA Consulting is one such company.
MHA is based in Phoenix and works with clients globally. We are a boutique business continuity consulting firm that has been in business for twenty-three years. I and our other consultants have over a century of combined experience in business continuity. (Before founding MHA, I was a regional VP for Bank of America, where I was responsible for business continuity across the southwest region.) MHA’s clients range from privately-owned businesses to Fortune 500 corporations. They are in industries ranging from healthcare, energy, and finance to pharmaceuticals, retail, aerospace, telecommunications, and food and beverage. They also include government agencies, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations.
Our experience has also taught us the following:
• The importance of delivering the highest caliber BCM consulting services with the utmost integrity and in a collegial spirit.
• That we serve our customers best by providing a range of services, from occasional guidance to full-on program design and implementation, depending on their needs and preferences.
• How to talk to management in their own language in discussing business continuity issues.
• That organizations benefit from adopting and aligning with a recognized business continuity standard.
• The importance of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
• The advantages of developing and using rational metrics to assess BCM investment options.
• The importance of measuring results achieved rather than volume of work performed.
• That business continuity is a process, not a project, because organizations and environments change over time.
• That a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.
• The benefits of developing a collaborative road map with BCM goals and timelines to guide program development over time.
Those are some of the lessons of our experience. They become real when we draw on them in providing our clients with business continuity advice and services.
MHA Consulting offers a full range of services covering every phase of the business continuity cycle. These include: business impact analyses (BIAs), threat and risk assessments, current state assessments, crisis management, business continuity, IT disaster recovery, risk mitigation, supply chain security, staff augmentation, training, and the designing and facilitating of mock disaster exercises, among others.
At every phase, we are available to offer high-level guidance, work with you shoulder to shoulder, or handle every aspect of the job so your people can focus on their regular duties.
MHA Consulting offers a full range of services covering every phase of the business continuity cycle
Through our sister company BCMMETRICS, we also offer the BCMMETRICS software suite, a powerful, easy-to-use collection of BCM software tools. Compliance Confidence provides FICO-like scores for your BCM program. BIA On-Demand streamlines the process of conducting a business impact analysis. BCM Planner lets you build and keep your recovery plans in one place. BCM One allows you to seamlessly access your site-recovery plans anywhere.
Are you interested in learning more about coping with today’s unique challenges and the pivot to resilience? I share my thoughts on the subject every other week at the BCMMETRICS blog. (The BCMMETRICS site is also the place to learn more about the BCMMETRICS software suite.) My colleague Richard Long, a senior advisory consultant at MHA, writes a biweekly blog on BC topics with an emphasis on IT/DR on the MHA blog (mha-it.com/blog). The MHA site is also the home of our free ebooks on crisis management, BIAs, and supply chain security , as well as case studies and other resources.
In today’s environment, threats are proliferating while the expectation that organizations will keep their essential operations going no matter what is rising. In this brave new world, the right BCM consulting firm can help you boost your resilience, harden your organization, and protect your stakeholders.
