Exploring Business Continuity Management

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Exploring Business Continuity Management

    The Business Continuity Management (BCM) application in ServiceNow offers a structured framework to manage business continuity tasks such as business impact analysis, planning, exercise management, and crisis response. It enables organizations to systematically prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptions by using predefined templates, workflows, and integrations.

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    Key Features

    • Structured Workflows: Guides BCM administrators and program managers through setting up, assessing, planning, exercising, and responding to crises in a streamlined process.
    • Business Impact Analysis (BIA): Allows assessment of critical services and dependencies, estimating recovery times and consequences of disruptions.
    • Business Continuity Planning (BCP): Facilitates creation and approval of detailed continuity plans including assets, scopes, recovery teams, and tasks.
    • Exercise Management: Supports continuous testing and improvement of plans to ensure readiness for actual crisis events.
    • Crisis Event Management: Enables tracking and management of crisis response tasks to reduce downtime and mitigate operational, financial, and reputational impacts.
    • Crisis Map Integration: Provides situational awareness through threat and alert data feeds, enabling initiation of response workflows directly from the map interface.
    • Emergency Notifications with Everbridge: Supports sending targeted emergency alerts and two-way communication to stakeholders during crises.
    • User Experience Enhancements: Includes the Coral theme as default and a dark mode option for better usability across web and mobile platforms.
    • Configurable Workspace: Introduced in version 5.x.x, this workspace offers an intuitive interface to perform BCM tasks efficiently.

    Practical Workflow for Customers

    • Download and install the BCM application from ServiceNow Store.
    • Set up BCM with templates and user roles (administrators, program managers, BIA and BCP administrators).
    • Create and approve business impact analyses to understand disruption effects.
    • Develop and approve business continuity plans incorporating assets, recovery teams, and tasks.
    • Schedule and manage exercises to validate and enhance plans.
    • Respond to crisis events by managing recovery activities and monitoring alerts via the Crisis map.
    • Send emergency notifications through Everbridge to inform stakeholders promptly.

    Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Centralized Management: Use dashboards like Home and My Tasks views to monitor and manage continuity activities and responsibilities effectively.
    • Improved Preparedness: Structured BIA and BCP processes help reduce downtime and financial or regulatory impacts during disruptions.
    • Enhanced Coordination: Integration with Crisis map and Everbridge streamlines alerting and response communication.
    • Continuous Improvement: Exercises allow ongoing testing and refinement of continuity plans to ensure organizational resilience.

    Learn how you can use the Business Continuity Management application to manage your business continuity tasks using predefined templates and workflows.

    Business Continuity Management overview

    The Business Continuity Management application provides a framework to perform continuous management activities such as business impact analysis, business continuity planning, exercise management, and crisis management. The structured workflows in the Business Continuity Management application improve your organizational ability to respond to the issues and recover quickly from the disruptions.

    Business Continuity Management workflow

    A typical workflow in the Business Continuity Management application involves the following steps for managing your business continuity tasks:

    BCM high level workflow.

    1. An administrator downloads the Business Continuity Management application from ServiceNow Store.
    2. The BCM administrator sets up the Business Continuity Management application and the templates for performing the business continuity activities.
    3. The BCM program manager or business impact analysis (BIA) administrator creates a business impact analysis to determine the impact of a disruption on the business processes and IT applications. The BIA administrator also focuses on the consequences of incidents and estimates the time of recovery to resume normal business operations.
    4. The BCM program manager or BCM lead reviews the assessments and approves the business impact analysis.
    5. The BCM program manager or business continuity plan (BCP) administrator creates a business continuity plan and adds the relevant assets, scope, documentation, related plans, recovery teams, loss scenarios, and recovery tasks to it. The BCP administrator then sends an approval request to the BCM lead to review and approve the business continuity plan.
    6. The BCM program manager creates exercise events, tracks the assets and their dependencies, and approves the exercise events.
    7. The BCM program manager responds to the crisis events, tracks the assets and their associated dependencies, and manages the recovery tasks to mitigate the negative impact of a disruption.
    8. The BCM program manager manages the alerts from the Crisis map interface and initiates the response workflows to minimize the downtime.
    9. The BCM administrator or BCM program manager sends the emergency notifications in Everbridge notifications system and notifies the stakeholders about the crisis alerts.

    Business Continuity Management benefits

    The Business Continuity Management application provides the following benefits:

    Benefit Feature Users
    Manage your business continuity activities from the interactive dashboard in the Home page. Home page view BCM program manager
    Monitor your individual and team tasks from a single dashboard in the My tasks view. My tasks page view BCM program manager
    Assess your critical business services and IT applications by creating a business impact analysis. Create a business impact analysis BCM program manager or BIA administrator
    Prepare a business continuity plan with a response strategy and get it reviewed by the BCM leads and program managers. Create a business continuity plan BCM program manager or BCP administrator
    Finalize your business continuity plan by continuously testing and exercising an event. Create an exercise BCM program manager or BCM planner
    Respond to an actual crisis event and manage the associated event tasks. Start a crisis event BCM program manager or BCM planner
    Respond to the alerts in Crisis map and set the recovery tasks into action to manage the alerts. Manage alerts from the map interface BCM administrator or BCM program manager
    Notify the stakeholders about the crisis alerts by sending emergency notifications in Everbridge. Sending notifications with Everbridge BCM administrator or BCM program manager

    Coral theme

    Coral is now the default theme for the Business Continuity Workspace. This theme provides a fresh look and feel, featuring brand-neutral illustrations to enhance your user experience. A dark theme option is available for web and mobile experiences.