Business impact analysis

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Business impact analysis

    Business impact analysis (BIA) is a structured process used to assess the impact and dependencies of disruptions on business processes or functions. It is a critical part of an organization's business continuity plan, helping to identify important information systems and develop strategies to minimize risks. By performing a BIA, business managers can predict consequences of unforeseen events, enabling effective recovery and informed decision-making that supports business growth.

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    Key Features

    • Creation and Management: The BIA owner initiates and manages the BIA within the Business Continuity Management (BCM) Workspace, adding details and coordinating responses to assessment questionnaires.
    • Assessment and Calculation: User responses help calculate recovery time objectives (RTO), recovery point objectives (RPO), and dependencies relevant to the business impact.
    • Review and Approval Workflow: The BIA undergoes review and approval by business or IT managers, progressing through states from draft to approved and archived.
    • Documentation: The BIA owner can generate and save a PDF version of the analysis for reference.
    • Templates and Configuration: Pre-configured BIA templates are available to streamline creation, allowing administrators to select impact categories and configure assessment grids.
    • Use Cases: BIA is applicable to assessing impacts on business services, processes, datacenters, and applications, supporting continuity management tasks.

    Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers

    ServiceNow customers can use the BCM application’s integrated BIA functionality to systematically evaluate the risks and impacts of potential business disruptions. This enables better prioritization of recovery efforts based on calculated RTO and RPO values, supports compliance with business continuity standards, and facilitates collaboration between business and IT stakeholders through structured workflows. Administrators can customize templates and grids to fit organizational needs, making the BIA process efficient and repeatable.

    Business impact analysis is a structured process where you assess the impact categories and dependencies and predict the consequences of a disruption on a business process or business function.

    An integral component of your business continuity plan

    A business impact analysis is an integral component of the business continuity plan for an organization. It includes information on the important information systems and a planning component that includes the strategies for minimizing your risks.

    Business managers have to make challenging decisions that can contribute to overall business growth. Sometimes, an unforeseen event or a disruption can cause disruptive effects. Performing a business impact analysis helps your business to mitigate these concerns. By evaluating the potential impact of an event or a decision, your business can predict future consequences and recover from setbacks successfully.

    For information on the use cases for business impact analysis, see Use cases for business impact analysis.

    Steps involved in creating a business impact analysis

    Typically, the following steps involved in creating a business impact analysis:
    • The business impact analysis owner creates a business impact analysis either from the Home page or the business impact analysis record page in the List view of the BCM UIB Workspace.
    • The BIA owner adds additional details for the business impact analysis on the Details tab.
    • Different users of the BCM application respond to the assessment questionnaire for the business impact analysis on the Assessment tab.
    • Based on the responses received, the BCM application calculates the recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), and dependencies for the business impact analysis.
    • The business impact analysis owner reviews the information and submits the analysis for a review and approval to the business manager for services or IT manager for applications respectively.
    • The business manager, IT manager, or BCM lead review the details of the business impact analysis and approve or reject it.
    • An approved business impact analysis is moved to Approved and later, it is moved to the Archived state.
    • The business impact analysis owner can generate the PDF of the analysis and save a copy for reference.

    A typical business impact analysis workflow is shown in the following examples:

    BIA workflow.

    BIA workflow for different roles.

    Setup tasks for the business impact analysis administrator

    If you are the business impact analysis administrator, you can view Setup for a business impact analysis for information on the setup tasks.

    Creating a business impact analysis in Business Continuity Workspace

    if you are the business impact analysis owner, you can create a business impact analysis in Business Continuity Workspace by using one of the following options:
    • You can navigate to the Business impact analysis tab in the Home page and select Create BIA as shown in the following example.

      Create BIA from the Home page.

      For the description of the cards and action buttons in the Business impact analysis tab of the Home page, see Home page view.

    • You can also navigate to the List view and select New in the Business Impact Analysis records as shown in the following example.

      Create BIA from the record page in the List view.

    To create a business impact analysis in Business Continuity Workspace, see Create a business impact analysis. For information on managing the tasks that are related to a business impact analysis, see Structured workflows for BIAs.