Towards Business Sustainability via an Automated Gaps Closure Approach

To ensure organization business and resources sustainability, it is required to establish Business Continuity Management System (BCMS). A key component of BCMS is conducting drills, which enables the organization to assess its readiness, sustainability and resiliency with an adequate planning for business continuation of unforeseen circumstances. The testing of the business services and processes is crucial and failing to conduct drills would lead to improper response and recovery strategies which will result in major financial loses. The drills aim to evaluate IT organization response, IT services recovery, identify observations, lessons learned and areas of improvement. As a result, identified observations are shared with service owners and tracked by BCMS to ensure closing all observations. However, tracking observations in a traditional manual approach is always associated with several challenges. This paper presents our experience in planning, executing, and validating the process of drills, by illustrating how an organization could overcome manual approach challenges with an automated observation tracking system. Additionally, we present our solution results in terms of time management and cost saving.