Business impact analysis (BIA) templates

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
    • Summarize
    Summarized using AI
    This content was generated using new OpenAI-powered functionality. Results are provided on an as is basis and are not guaranteed to be accurate or complete.

    Summary of Business impact analysis (BIA) templates

    The Business Continuity Management (BCM) application in ServiceNow provides pre-configured Business Impact Analysis (BIA) templates designed to streamline the creation of business impact analyses. These templates help BCM or BIA administrators by offering a structured approach to assess business processes and their dependencies efficiently.

    Show full answer Show less

    Key Features

    • Pre-configured Templates: Templates come with predefined impact categories and dependency groups, reducing setup time and effort.
    • Role-Based Access: Users with the snbcm.admin role can view, configure, and customize BIA templates.
    • Primary Element Selection: Templates allow selection of the primary element being assessed, such as business processes or configuration item services.
    • Impact Categories: Enables assessment of specific impact types relevant to the organization, e.g., financial or legal impacts.
    • Dependency Groups: Automatically populates dependency groups like Applications, Hardware, Software, Vendors, and Workplaces during assessment, which can be modified as needed.
    • Inclusion of CIA Attributes: Optionally include Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability considerations for critical data within the analysis.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Efficiency: Using BIA templates simplifies and accelerates the creation of comprehensive business impact analyses, saving time and resources.
    • Consistency: Standardized templates ensure consistent assessment criteria across different analyses.
    • Flexibility: Configurable elements such as impact categories and dependency groups allow tailoring the analysis to the specific needs of your organization.
    • Improved Risk Assessment: Automatically populated dependency groups help identify critical dependencies, supporting better continuity planning and risk management.

    Configuration Highlights

    Administrators can configure templates by setting the name, description, primary element assessed, impact categories, dependency assessments, and CIA inclusion. This configuration supports aligning the BIA with organizational priorities and operational realities.

    The Business Continuity Management application provides pre-configured business impact analysis (BIA) templates for creating a business impact analysis. If you are the BCM or BIA administrator, you can use the BIA Templates module in the Business Continuity Management application. You can then select the type of the template, elements, impact categories, and so on, for the business impact analysis.

    Advantages of using a BIA template

    The BIA templates store information such as the impact categories and dependency groups that a business process depends on. Using a BIA template offers the following advantages:
    • Simplifies the process of creating a business impact analysis.
    • Saves time and resources by pre-populating the templates.
    • Helps you to define the primary object type that you can use the BIA template for. For example, you can use the Application technical impact analysis template to perform a technical impact analysis of an IT application.
    • Populates the dependency groups automatically in the BIA.
    • Helps you to select the impact categories that are relevant to your organization.

    BIA templates in BCM

    If you have the sn_bcm.admin role, you can view the BIA templates that are installed with demo data when you install the application or configure a BIA template in the BIA Templates module. The following example shows the BIA templates that are installed with demo data in the Business Continuity Management application.

    BIA templates that are installed with demo data.

    BIA template configuration

    With the sn_bcm.admin role, you can configure the following details in the BIA template:
    Name and Description
    Use the Name and Description fields to search for the name and select an appropriate template for your business impact analysis.
    Primary Element Assessed
    Select the type of the elements that you plan to assess such as Business processes or CI service.
    Impact Categories
    Assess specific impact categories during the business impact analysis. For example, you plan to assess the financial impact and legal impact of a downtime.
    Dependency Assessments
    Identify the dependencies for your business impact analysis.
    Include CIA
    Include CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) information in your business impact analysis if the primary element being analyzed has critical data.

    The following example shows the sample configuration of a BIA template in an instance.

    Configuration of a BIA template.

    Configuring a BIA template

    For more information on how to configure a BIA template with the sn_bcm.admin role, see Configure BIA templates with legacy assessment.

    Impact dependency groups

    The BIA template used for creating a business impact analysis has dependency groups associated to it. When conducting an assessment, the dependency groups are automatically populated in the BIA. You can view them as Applications, Hardware, Software, Vendors, Workplaces, and others, each in its own container depending on how many of these groups are associated to the template.

    Dependency groups.

    Each of them is a dependency group and you can add or remove items that belong to each group within its container.