Impact categories and ratings
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Summary of Impact categories and ratings
Impact categories and ratings are essential components within the Business Continuity Management (BCM) application in ServiceNow. They enable organizations to assess and classify the types and severity of impacts experienced during downtime or disruptive events. This classification supports determining key recovery objectives such as Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), helping organizations effectively plan for business continuity and disaster recovery.
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The BCM administrator is responsible for defining and managing these impact categories and ratings, tailoring them to the organization’s operational context and risk management needs.
Impact Categories
Impact categories represent broad types of impacts caused by service, process, or application downtime. Common categories include:
- Legal impact: Impacts involving legal consequences like lawsuits or fines.
- Regulatory impact: Impacts arising from regulatory changes or new policies.
- Reputation impact: Impacts affecting brand image and company reputation.
- Revenue impact: Financial losses or reduced revenues due to disruptions.
- Workforce impact: Effects on workforce morale or attrition, such as post-pandemic challenges.
BCM administrators can view predefined impact categories with demo data or create new categories. Each category can be configured with:
- Name: Descriptive title for the impact category
- Contribution: Whether it influences RTO or RPO
- Applicable timeframes: Time periods relevant to the impact
- Maximum RTO value: The upper limit for recovery time for this impact
- Description and helper text: Guidance and explanations to assist users during assessments
Impact Ratings
Impact ratings provide more granular assessments within each impact category. BCM administrators can define specific ratings to quantify the severity or tolerance of impacts. Each rating includes:
- Name: Unique identifier for the rating
- Associated impact category: Linking the rating to its category
- Value: Unique numerical value to rank or measure the impact
- Tolerable flag: Indicates if the impact is tolerable for RTO-related categories
- Description and question text: Details and customized questions for use in business impact analysis forms
These ratings help to standardize and streamline the impact assessment process, enabling consistent evaluation across the organization.
Practical Use for ServiceNow Customers
By leveraging impact categories and ratings in the BCM application, ServiceNow customers can:
- Customize impact assessments to accurately reflect their business environment and risk profile
- Define measurable recovery objectives tailored to different impact types
- Enhance business impact analysis with clear guidance and structured evaluation criteria
- Support informed decision-making for continuity planning and incident response prioritization
BCM administrators should configure these settings carefully to align with organizational policies and recovery strategies, ensuring effective and actionable impact assessments.
Impact categories are the types of an impact that you can assess during a business impact analysis. The BCM administrator of an organization is responsible for defining the impact categories and the timeframe during which an organization may experience a downtime. This information is used to determine the recovery time objective and recovery point objective of the assets.
Broad classification of the impact categories
- Legal impact: Classified as an impact with legal implications such as a civil lawsuit or fines that result from a service disruption.
- Regulatory impact: Classified as an impact due to a change in the existing regulation or the introduction of a new policy.
- Reputation impact: Classified as an impact to the brand image and reputation of a company.
- Revenue impact: Classified as an impact due to financial losses or low revenues.
- Workforce impact: Classified as an impact of a disruptive event on the workforce. For example, a company experiences an increased attrition rate and low employee morale post the pandemic.
Impact categories in BCM
With the BCM administrator role, you can view the impact categories that are installed with demo data and set up new impact categories in the Impact categories module of the BCM application. The following example shows the impact categories that are installed with demo data in an instance.
Configuration of an impact category
The BCM administrators can configure or modify the impact categories by adding key information about the impact. The following example shows the configuration details of an impact category in an instance.
- Name
- Classify the impact of a downtime for your service, process, or applications by adding an appropriate name for the impact such as Legal or Reputational impact.
- Contributes to
- Select whether the impact contributes to recovery time objective or recovery point objective.
- Applicable timeframes
- Set the applicable timeframe for the impact category.
- Maximum RTO value
- Define the maximum RTO value for the impact category.
- Description
- Add description for the impact category.
- Helper text
- Add the helper text that provides a hint to the users on how to respond to the assessment questions. The helper text is then displayed for the user in the business impact analysis record. In the following example,
Select an estimated time for each impact level is the helper text for the impact category.
Impact category configuration by the administrators
For more information on how to configure an impact category with the sn_bcm.admin role, see Configure impact category for BIA.
Impact ratings in BCM
If you have the BCM administrator role, you can view the impact ratings that are installed with demo data and define specific impact ratings in the Impact ratings module. The following example shows the impact ratings that are installed with demo data for an impact category.
The impact ratings for an impact category are shown in the following example.
Configuration of an impact rating
- Name
- Assign a unique name to the impact rating.
- Impact Category
- Classify the impact category that the impact rating is associated with.
- Value
- Assign a unique numerical value to each impact rating. The same value can not be reused for any other impact rating in the BCM application.
- Tolerable
- Select the option for enabling the RTO impact as tolerable. This check box appears only if the impact category contributes to the recovery time objective.
- Description
- Add the description about the impact rating.
- Question text
- Revise the question text in the Impact Rating record for the recovery time objective of an impact category. The revised question is then displayed in the RTO assessment form of the business impact analysis record.
Impact rating configuration by the administrators
For more information on how to configure an impact rating with the sn_bcm.admin role, see Configure impact ratings.