Almost perfect timing for BS ISO 31030:2021 Guidance for organizations
It has taken nearly ten years for an idea shared at a British Standards meeting in London to grow and develop into a full International Standard. The story of how the standard emerged is a great example of how industry professionals can work together to share experience and build solutions that can help address serious issues. The new guidance from ISO and the BSI sets a new standard for travel risk management that will help organizations of all types get back to work and build business travel confidence.
Modern business takes our people all over the world, but for some the experience of the jet set lifestyle can quickly transform into a nightmare if things go wrong. A serious illness, traffic accident, mugging or theft can quickly throw a business travellers’ plans into chaos and expose them and their employer to even greater risks and potential harm. Yet most business travellers and their employers these risks are rarely thought through, and this leads many struggling to cope when the inevitable happens. This happens to hundreds of thousands of people each year, but it doesn’t have to be this way and in a post-covid world we must do more to minimise travel risk of all types.
Almost perfect timing for BS ISO 31030:2021 Guidance for organizations
It has taken nearly ten years for an idea shared at a British Standards meeting in London to grow and develop into a full International Standard. The story of how the standard emerged is a great example of how industry professionals can work together to share experience and build solutions that can help address serious issues. The new guidance from ISO and the BSI sets a new standard for travel risk management that will help organizations of all types get back to work and build business travel confidence.
Modern business takes our people all over the world, but for some the experience of the jet set lifestyle can quickly transform into a nightmare if things go wrong. A serious illness, traffic accident, mugging or theft can quickly throw a business travellers’ plans into chaos and expose them and their employer to even greater risks and potential harm. Yet most business travellers and their employers these risks are rarely thought through, and this leads many struggling to cope when the inevitable happens. This happens to hundreds of thousands of people each year, but it doesn’t have to be this way and in a post-covid world we must do more to minimise travel risk of all types.
For the past three years work has been underway to develop new guidance to help organizations meet their Duty of Care for travellers. National Standards Bodies from more than 60 countries have been working with the ISO technical committeee for Risk Management (TC262) to agree a good practice framework that helps keep people safer and provides evidence that the organization is meeting its’ legal duties.
The Continuity Forum has been directly engaged in the work on the guidance at the national and international levels, as well as developing active sector engagement through our Policy Working Group (PWG).
Last winter heavy rain, storm force winds and large waves combined with high spring tides presented England with unprecedented flooding from the sea, rivers, groundwater and surface water.
Thousands of properties were flooded, infrastructure was damaged and tragically, eight people lost their lives. The full impact of these events has not yet been calculated but we do know that 175,000 businesses in England are at risk of flooding [note1].
These videos introduce the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report. The findings of Working Group Two focuses on Vulnerability,Impacts and Adaptation.
These are central themes of not only the latest thinking on how best to meet the Climate Change Challenge, but go to the heart of the work of Risk and Business Continuity professionals across business around the world.
The threat of a continued outage in a critical business processes can have major consequences for an energy or utility company. In an era of instant information, stakeholders demand to know whether an organisation is prepared to react appropriately and ensure continuity of operations.
Recent disasters and their associated impact in Middle East and North Africa have highlighted the importance of system availability, forcing senior management to have contingency planning on the forefront of their minds.
The Business Continuity Management for Utilities Conference will be held from 13 – 16 September 2015 in Abu Dhabi, UAE, to help organisations develop their Business Continuity Management (BCM) and Crisis Management (CM) learning road maps. The conference will equip business leaders with the tools needed to, not just survive, but thrive in this new world of risk.
Why Attend:
➤ Learn how to execute a successful business continuity plan and recovery processes for your business
➤ Discuss BCM trends and how to overcome the cultural challenges faced in the Middle East
➤ Ensure appropriate levels of communication and information between the incident management and business continuity teams, suppliers and other stakeholders
➤ Gain valuable knowledge and information through networking sessions, experience sharing and panel discussions
➤ Interact and network with industry experts from leading utilities plus national and international oil companies
➤ Explore BCM solutions that will enhance your organisation’s resilience
Key topics include:
➤ Road map to your organisational business continuity management competencies
➤ Implications of ISO
➤ Cyber terrorism: The emerging threat
➤ Incident response and the crisis / emergency management plan
➤ Cultural change for behaviour and attitude shifts
➤ Recovery time and recover point objectives
➤ Supply chain and service provider resilience
➤ Implications of political unrest on country infrastructure
The BSI has confirmed that the new International Standard for Business Continuity - ISO 22301 Societal Security Business Continuity Management Systems Requirements - will be officially published in mid May.
We expect that copies will be available for purchase from around the 15th May from this official link.
With the publication of ISO 22301 it is expected that many countries around the world will formally adopt the International Standards Organization Standard for Business Continuity, enabling much greater international consistency to be realised between national requirements and better meeting the needs of global organizations.
In addition, as part of the ISO framework of standards, the new format helps create opportunities to manage what have often been independent systems in a more integrated way through common terms and processes. This should assist in better embedding of the various management systems available from ISO within organisations.
The 3PQ project team has won the Best Contribution to the Business Continuity Profession prize at the annual BANG Business Continuity Awards recently held in London.
3PQ is a free resource designed to deliver practical help to those in involved in managing Business Continuity in the Supply Chain. It provides a structured framework of questions that help establish the BCM capability and priorities that is both consistent and adaptable to a wide range of organisations. 3PQ stands for Third Party Questionnaire.
Gayle Hedgecock, Chair of the 3PQ committee commented at the awards “We are pleased to see that the 3PQ has been focused upon once again and that the team’s work has now been recognised with this prestigious award. Now is the right time for organisations to fully embrace this questionnaire and to review the Business Continuity Management (BCM) capability of their supply chain, as part of their preparedness for the London 2012 Olympics, any unusual events and for day-to-day operations.”
Vice-Chair of the committee Sara McKenna added "People need a wide range of tools to deliver effective BCM. With the 3PQ they have an easy, yet capable resource that can immediately help identify problems and build Continuity and Resilience in a difficult area. By making it free to use there really is no excuse for not addressing the supply chain risk with a bit more rigour."
The 3PQ project team deserves mention and big thank you should go to: Natalie Cooper, Robin Dunford-Green, Matt Innerd, Colin Ive, Roger Jarvis, Sharad Karia, Simon Maddox, John Robinson, Bob Simpson, Andy Tomkinson,, Bill May, Nestor Alfonzo Santamaria and Steve Yates.
After six months in the wild and over 13,000 downloads the first review of the Questionnaire is currently being planned.
You can download and provide your feedback on this industry award winning initiative by visiting the3PQ Project Page.
The awards night brought another prize for the Continuity Forum with Russell Price winning the Rocket Science award (we don't what it means either!) and Sara missed out by the finest of margins in the tighest vote of the night for the most helpful person in the industry award ... probably as she was just too busy to vote!
Last year Continuity Forum reported on E.ON UK’s accomplishment in achieving BS25999-2 certification across its Business services, with no non-conformities found .
Recently, following a Continuing Assessment surveillance visit by BSI auditors, E.ON UK has been successful in maintaining its Business Continuity certification - again with no non-conformities found.
The Continuity Forum has built a special series of education events designed to get your planning off to the right start and help you and your colleagues develop the right skills as your planning develops and matures.
Our approach is to break down the whole Business Continuity Management Cycle into manageable chunks that help ensure the lessons learned can be applied between sessions.
For some time now question marks have been placed against airports and their Business Continuity and resilience capability. In the past year alone we have seen at close hand the global chaos caused by the volcanic ash cloud, while more recently we witnessed some of Europe’s leading airports struggle to maintain operational readiness during periods of heavy snowfall.
If we go back a little further there are other striking examples, all of which add to the pervading view that airports cannot cope effectively when placed under duress and that their Business Continuity need to be improved.
The Continuity Forum 'Building the BC Plan' event is aimed at those looking to develop their Business Continuity skills, or those at the very start of the BC Planning phase within their organisation.
Within small groups we explore what BCM means to your organisation and how you can meet your obligations to customers and other stakeholders in an efficient and comprehensive manner.
Does the phrase continual improvement turn you cold?
Do you feel under pressure to keep reinventing the Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) wheel?
What is continual improvement?
If you think that you have to find new ways to improve your Business Continuity system every day for the rest of your life, relax. Continual improvement is a state of mind as much as identifying tangible improvements.
Take a look at what is meant by the words continual and improvement.
Conventional approaches to Business Continuity Management (BCM) system adoption typically involve choosing from a range of cumbersome and expensive software packages which require a company to change the way it runs its business to fit in with the BCM solution being implemented.
For the past three years work has been underway to develop new guidance to help organizations meet their Duty of Care for travellers. National Standards Bodies from more than 60 countries have been working with the ISO technical committeee for Risk Management (TC262) to agree a good practice framework that helps keep people safer and provides evidence that the organization is meeting its’ legal duties.
With the publication of ISO 22301 it is expected that many countries around the world will formally adopt the International Standards Organization Standard for Business Continuity, enabling much greater international consistency to be realised between national requirements and better meeting the needs of global organizations. 
The Continuity Forum 'Building the BC Plan' event is aimed at those looking to develop their Business Continuity skills, or those at the very start of the BC Planning phase within their organisation. 
