Structured workflows for Business Impact Analysis
Summarize
Summary of Structured workflows for Business Impact Analysis
Business Impact Analysis (BIA) helps ServiceNow customers predict the consequences of disruptions on business processes or functions, which are essential for delivering services or products. BIA identifies and prioritizes critical processes, quantifies impacts, and determines recovery dependencies, enabling organizations to prepare effective recovery strategies. Performing BIA annually on critical processes is recommended to assess impacts on revenue, legal issues, workforce, and reputation, as well as dependencies on applications, technology, or vendors.
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Impact Ratings and Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
The Business Continuity Management (BCM) administrator configures impact ratings, which define tolerability thresholds for various impact categories such as revenue or regulatory impacts. These ratings guide BIA owners in identifying disruption timelines that exceed tolerable limits. When multiple impact ratings exist for an impact category, the first non-tolerable impact rating's disruption duration is used to determine the Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
Examples illustrate how different tolerability settings for impact ratings (Low, Moderate, High) affect the RTO calculation, influencing prioritization and recovery planning. If all impact ratings are marked tolerable, the maximum RTO value specified in the template is used.
Impact Category Scoring and Overall Assessment
For impact categories contributing to the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), each impact analysis question is evaluated based on criteria such as business criticality. The highest value among these questions determines the category score, stored in the Impact Category Results table. Updating disruption durations automatically recalculates the BIA's overall RTO as the lowest tolerable downtime among impact categories.
This recalculated RTO aligns with predefined recovery tiers—from "Immediate Mission Critical" to "Non-Essential"—that vary across organizations, helping customers prioritize recovery efforts appropriately.
Creating and Using Business Impact Analysis in ServiceNow
ServiceNow customers can create a BIA to gather essential information for recovery planning, including determining recovery time objectives and prioritizing assets based on their critical dependencies. This structured approach helps identify impact categories and underlying dependencies across different types, facilitating targeted and effective business continuity planning.
Business impact analysis helps you to predict the consequences of a disruption on a business process or business function.
A business process is a set of tasks done by a business organization to deliver a business service or product to customers. When a business process is disrupted, the impact to the organization can be huge in terms of revenue and reputation. Business impact analysis (BIA) is performed to identify and prioritize critical processes, quantify or qualify the impacts, and identify recovery dependencies. Ideally, business impact analysis on critical processes must be performed annually.
The assessment of a business critical process disruption helps you to estimate the consequential impact on your business revenue, legal issues, workforce disruption, or business reputation. It also enables you to identify the dependencies of your business process on business applications, technology, or vendors that might be affected. This analysis gathers the information needed to develop recovery strategies.
Impact ratings for your business impact analysis
The Business Continuity Management (BCM) administrator of your organization defines the impact ratings for your business impact analysis (BIA) and decides if the impact is tolerable for your business process. For more information on the impact ratings, see Configure an impact rating to assess an impact category. According to the configuration set up by the BCM administrator, the questions are displayed in the RTO Impact Assessment tab.
Consider the following example where the BCM administrator has configured an intolerable impact rating for the Revenue impact category. The BCM administrator has defined what qualifies to be an intolerable impact. As a BIA
owner, you must identify the timeline at which the revenue impact may go beyond $1M.
Multiple impact ratings for an impact category
If your BCM administrator has configured the assessment questionnaire to include multiple impact ratings for an impact category, the impact category ratings are displayed in the Impact Category view as shown in the following example.
- Low = 1
- Moderate = 2
- High = 3
| Scenario | Non-tolerable impact | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Scenario 1 | In the Impact Ratings table, the Tolerable field is set to false. | If the administrator has specified that Low regulatory impact is non-tolerable, its corresponding disruption duration is set as the recovery time objective (RTO). In this example, the disruption duration for the 01 - Low impact rating is set to 4 hours. Therefore, the recovery time objective (RTO) for the impact category is above 4 hours. Even if the moderate impact disruption duration is shorter, the calculation will select the value from the first alphanumerically sorted impact rating that has the Tolerable field set to false. |
| Scenario 2 | In the Impact Ratings table, the Tolerable field is set to false. | If the administrator has specified that Moderate regulatory impact is non-tolerable, its corresponding disruption duration is set as the recovery time objective (RTO). In this example, the disruption duration for 02 - Moderate impact is set to 24 hours. Therefore, the recovery time objective (RTO) for the impact category is above 24 hours. |
| Scenario 3 | In the Impact Ratings table, the Tolerable field is set to false. | If the administrator has specified that High regulatory impact is non-tolerable, its corresponding disruption duration is set as the recovery time objective (RTO) as shown in the following example. In the tabular example, the disruption duration for 03 - High impact is set to 72 hours. Therefore, the recovery time objective for the impact category is above 72 hours. |
| Scenario 4 | The Tolerable field for the Low, Moderate, and High impact ratings is set to true. | If the administrator has set all the impact ratings as tolerable, the value specified in the Maximum RTO value field in the template is selected as the recovery time objective (RTO). In the following example, the administrator has set all the impact ratings as tolerable. Therefore, the recovery time objective (RTO) is one month as per the value specified in the Maximum RTO
value field. |
- Calculation of category score from impact analysis questions for an impact category that contributes to Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
If the impact category contributes to RPO, then evaluate each impact analysis question in that RPO category based on the value of your data like business critical, operation critical, business essential, or operation essential. The maximum value among all the questions of that RPO is considered as the Category Score of that Impact Category and stored in the Impact Category Results table [sn_bia_category_result].
- Calculation of overall impact assessment result for a BIA
When you update the Disruption Duration of an impact category, the RTO of the BIA is automatically updated. The RTO of the BIA is set as the lowest tolerable downtime from each impact category.
For example, consider a BIA having four impact categories – Legal, Reputation, Workforce, and Regulatory. When you update the disruption duration value of the legal impact category, then the RTO value of the BIA is recalculated based on the lowest tolerable disruption duration from each impact category. The Recovery Tier varies from organization to organization and is set based on the recalculated RTO value.
RTO value Recovery Tier Immediate Mission Critical 1 Hour Mission Critical 4 Hours Mission Critical 8 Hours Business Critical 24 Hours Business Critical 72 Hours Essential 1 Week Essential 2 Weeks Non-Essential 1 Month Non-Essential