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A STANDARD FOR BUSINESS CONTINUITY

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As announced on this website on the 30th June, British Standards Institution has formed a technical committee to commence the development of a British Standard for Business Continuity Management.

The first meeting of the committee will take place on the 23rd August and John Sharp, Policy & Development Director of Continuity Forum, who chaired the team that developed the BSI Guide to BCM, (PAS56), will sit on the committee along with Continutiy Forum Chairman, Russell Price.

Over the next 12 to 18 months the UK has a unique opportunity to build on the foundation of PAS 56, which has sold over 4500 copies worldwide, and create a workable BCM Standard.

As BCM has developed and it becomes more mainstream it has been recognised that some uniformity of approach is required. No organisation is an island, they reply upon suppliers, outsourcers and intermediaries, i.e. their partners, to assist them in delivering their products and services to their clients and customers. These partners serve many organisations across all sectors and they will be called upon to have BCM processes in place by many of their customers.

If the processes comply with a BS BCM Standard then organisations will have greater confidence in their trading partners and the partners will minimise their cost of BCM compliance by using a single certification process.

The creation of a BCM standard raises many questions:

- What form should that standard take and what should be included?

- What, if any, evaluation criteria should used to ensure that an organisation has achieved compliance with the standard?

- How should organisations be certified and audited?

- Can it apply to public sector organisations?

- How do we avoid the standard being for the 'big boys' only and not applicable for the SME market?

- How do we avoid more red tape being imposed on an already pressurised SME management?

The Continuity Forum provides you an opportunity to have your say. By joining in our BCM standards debate you will be able to share with other participants your views and indirectly provide input to the BSI deliberations.

To support this debate we will be holding a number of general face to face meetings addressing issues related to the developing standard. These will commennce in the Autumn after the formal launch of the Standards Committee in August.

We will also be hosting through the Forum Discussion area of this website an on-line group which will facilitate further professional debate and provide an opportunity to share ideas and materials relevant to the profession.

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If you would like to know more about how your organisation can get involved and benefit from working with the Continuity Forum, please email us HERE! or call on + 44 (0) 208 993 1599.