BIA (Business Impact Analysis) or not?
Recently, I am observing a new trend of running a Business Continuity programs where BIA is completely skipped. Performing BIA from start to finish is expensive and often intangible. Reason being, BIA, in my opinion is more of a bottom-up approach of analyzing the potential impacts and figuring out the qualitative or quantitative losses.
Rather a different approach is ‘top-down’ approach where business process owners decide where and when is IT needed the most. For example, Dell.com will need Order-to-cash business process at the minimal and maybe customer service also depending on the budget availability. Clearly, this is a top-down approach as against performing BIA and the value offered here, although intangible it is, helps ‘carve out’ areas of the IT ecosystem for focusing with budget and resources to keep the continuity.
In my opinion, focusing the Business continuity program on objectives is a better investment than BIA.