Exploring Business Continuity Management
Summarize
Summary of Exploring Business Continuity Management
The Business Continuity Management (BCM) application in ServiceNow Yokohama provides a comprehensive framework to manage business continuity activities such as business impact analysis (BIA), continuity planning, exercise management, and crisis management. It leverages structured workflows and predefined templates to help organizations quickly respond to disruptions and recover critical business functions effectively.
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Key Features
- Business Impact Analysis: Assess the impact of disruptions on business processes and IT applications, estimate recovery times, and understand incident consequences.
- Business Continuity Planning: Create detailed continuity plans including assets, documentation, recovery teams, loss scenarios, and recovery tasks, with approval workflows.
- Exercise Management: Continuously test and improve continuity plans through simulated exercises to ensure readiness for actual crises.
- Crisis Event Management: Respond to live crisis events by tracking affected assets, managing recovery tasks, and minimizing operational downtime and other impacts.
- Crisis Map Integration: Visualize and manage alerts through the integrated Crisis map interface, initiating response workflows to handle threats.
- Emergency Notifications: Integrate with Everbridge to send emergency alerts and facilitate communication with stakeholders during crises.
- Configurable Workspace and Themes: Utilize the BCM Configurable Workspace for intuitive task management, with options for Coral (default) and dark themes enhancing user experience on web and mobile.
Practical Workflow for BCM in ServiceNow
- Download and set up the BCM application and templates via the ServiceNow Store.
- Create and approve business impact analyses to understand disruption effects.
- Develop and review business continuity plans with defined scope, assets, and recovery strategies.
- Schedule and manage exercises to validate and refine continuity plans.
- Manage crisis events and alerts to coordinate timely responses and recovery activities.
- Send emergency notifications through Everbridge to alert relevant stakeholders.
Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Centralized Management: Use interactive dashboards like Home and My Tasks for comprehensive visibility of continuity activities and task tracking.
- Improved Resilience: Structured workflows and continuous testing help reduce downtime and mitigate financial, reputational, and regulatory risks.
- Integrated Communications: Efficiently notify and coordinate with stakeholders during emergencies using integrated notification systems.
- Configurable and User-Friendly: Tailor the workspace to your needs with intuitive interfaces and theme options for enhanced usability.
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:
- Administrator downloads the Business Continuity Management application from ServiceNow Store.
- BCM administrator sets up the Business Continuity Management application and the templates for performing the business continuity activities.
- 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.
- BCM program manager or BCM lead reviews the assessments and approves the business impact analysis.
- 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.
- BCM program manager creates exercise events, tracks the assets and their dependencies, and approves the exercise events.
- 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.
- BCM program manager manages the alerts from the Crisis map interface and initiates the response workflows to minimize the downtime.
- 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 the default theme for the Business Continuity Workspace. It 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.