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Dr. Claudia E. Tatum, CEOAssisting these enterprises in their preparedness plan is a global consulting firm, Protiviti. The company offers deep expertise and insights through a customized approach and unparalleled collaboration to help businesses face the future positively. They support and guide organizations in designing a business continuity and resilience program based on the changing work environment, enabling clients to respond swiftly to changing conditions. “It is difficult to imagine a more critical time for organizations to focus on sound corporate governance and culture as the global business environment continues to be challenged by the pandemic, economic volatility, and racial and social justice issues,” Joseph Tarantino, President and CEO of Protiviti. “Strong governance practices can serve to help boards provide oversight and mitigate their business and financial risks and ensure their operational resilience.”
Planning for Operations and Business Continuity
Protiviti believes in developing business continuity programs that can be implemented globally in any scenario during an actual event. Its planning philosophy, well balanced with a mature knowledge transfer process, is designed to allow organizations to effectively manage business continuity internally without any additional overhead costs. The company takes an innovative approach to business continuity management based on four interrelated disciplines, namely business process recovery, IT disaster recovery, crisis management and communications, and pandemic risk management.
They start by initiating business process recovery, which requires the support of IT systems, applications, processes, databases, and network assets. Therefore, the company takes the necessary steps to keep these systems up and to run. The next move is to gain control over a crisis with a series of actions that minimizes any adverse impact. They also prepare an effective recovery plan simultaneously. Finally, Protiviti helps businesses design, develop, and implement pandemic preparation and response plans to ensure clients can react to any crisis with zero downtime.
With its in-depth understanding of how to apply business metrics to gauge impacts and program objectives, the company delivers self-sustaining and unprejudiced IT and business risk solutions. The personalized consulting approach and tailored, easy-to-use, cost-effective, and web-based planning tool of Protiviti ensure the longevity of a plan.
Over the years, Protiviti has designed a six-element methodology to implement and execute business continuity management successfully throughout an organization. Clients can keep their business running during a crisis by harnessing these comprehensive services. The first step is an effective business continuity management plan. It starts with elaborating the concept of a company’s universe through a process map and other definitions such as using departments or locations. The concept should also include links to the IT landscape. Based on the company’s universe, Protiviti helps clients to identify critical functions and create adequate action plans to establish a solid foundation for business continuity management. After process architecture analyses, the next step is business impact analysis, where the company thoroughly studies an organization’s current operations, business processes, and supporting infrastructure to determine the operational, financial, and reputational criticality and impact of downtime. They categorize and measure risks across all the critical areas of a business while identifying reliance on production facilities, IT systems, and process interdependencies. Understanding the existing recovery capabilities and gaining consensus on process criticality metrics, the team decides recovery time objectives for business processes and supporting infrastructure.
It is difficult to imagine a more critical time for organizations to focus on sound corporate governance and culture as the global business environment continues to be challenged by the pandemic, economic volatility, and racial and social justice issues
The next step in the methodology revolves around responding to an emergency and crisis scenario. Organizations have to pass three phases—chaos, response, and recovery—to overcome a crisis. Protiviti develops action plans based on realistic emergencies to allow businesses to respond in time during all these three phases. Organizations should be able to support rescue teams in the chaos phase and minimize the loss by maintaining operations and establishing communication in response to a crisis. For instance, if the office building is not accessible due to a fire emergency, it will affect all the critical processes. Organizations can quickly respond to such situations with an effective action plan that includes providing emergency workstations at various locations for executives or individuals responsible for critical operations. Eventually, they can return to normal, transitioning from emergency to business continuity by following the action plan. To make this happen, companies should test the proper functioning of emergency and crisis management programs regularly by practicing emergencies. The simulation of crisis scenarios such as performing fire drills with the workforce and exercising predefined steps within crisis management enable companies to adjust and improvise emergency measures accordingly.
Protiviti involves both internal and external stakeholders in emergency planning based on their tasks and responsibilities as emergency or crisis management sometimes requires the action of parties outside an organization such as residents, public authorities, regulators, and many others. Take a case of chemical leakage, for instance. The organization needs to inform the local fire brigade, the environmental agency, neighboring companies, and residents as the sudden leakage could be a threat to groundwater. This enables all the entities to handle the situation seamlessly with appropriate preparedness.
“Strong governance practices can serve to help boards provide oversight and mitigate their business and financial risks and ensure their operational resilience”
Sustainable Business Continuity Management
Protiviti has prepared and helped several customers over the years in implementing sustainable business continuity management plans. There are several instances that tell the story of its success and service reach—scaled across different industries. For a battery manufacturer and distributor, the company has formalized a business continuity management framework and governance program. The team also developed an IT disaster recovery plan, including detailed application run-books for critical applications. In another instance, Protiviti worked in liaison with a leading Polish TV network station to conduct extensive business impact analysis. The company used the capability maturity model to gather inputs from process owners regarding the current maturity of BCM. They prioritized processes and created process maps as a basis for criticality analysis while determining business recovery time with written and visual summarization of results. The company has also supported a medium-sized financial service provider in automotive leasing and funding by compiling the bank’s process landscape and identifying process dependencies. They executed business impact analysis for criticality and recovery time objectives visualized in a component matrix. Additionally, Protiviti created action plans, determining emergency workstations and developing emergency scenarios.
There are many such examples where the company helped plan business continuity management and enabled clients to protect their people and brand and remain compliant with regulations simultaneously. Protiviti and its independent and locally-owned member firms offer managed solutions and consultations for critical business problems in operations, finance, data analytics, internal audit, risk compliance, and governance across the globe. Its continuity consultants have played a crucial role in shaping business continuity education by significantly contributing to creating the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) course on continuity of operations. They have also developed a dedicated continuity program assessment for federal agencies to support federal preparedness circular-65. The company helps clients stay a notch above the rest by prioritizing business continuity and resilience programs, employing good business practices, and exercising forethought to enhance their ability to coursecorrect in no time when things go out of control. Protiviti’s diverse workforce of professionals that share the common value of collaboration is dedicated to helping organizations face the future with greater confidence.
March 18, 2021
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