The business impact analysis

This paper explores how an organisation can structure it's Business Impact Analysis (BIA) used to improve its Business Continuity capabilities and hence its overall resilience. The BIA is the first step that managers take to understand and prepare an effective response to events that can threaten the ability of a given organisation to create value. There have been many attempts to suggest how organisations can structure this analysis, but there is no set standard approach that can be taken off the shelf and used by managers and specialists. This paper proposes a structure which centres on the organisations' ability to create something of value and from there a stepwise analytical approach that ends in the estimation of recovery time and resource commitment to resume activities. The BIA follows a stepwise process starting with understanding what value creation means to a given organisation by determining its business model. Understanding value forms the basis for the next steps in the process: identification of critical activities, their interdependencies, robustness, internal and external resources needed, estimating maximum tolerable downtime and, finally, determining recovery time. The paper uses the example of a mining project in Greenland to illustrate how the individual steps play a role in the overall analysis of business continuity efforts of an organisation. However, it is possible to use the BIA approach in any organisation that faces hazards in the context where they operate.