IBM OpenPages Business Continuity Management

The new IBM OpenPages® Business Continuity Management (BCM) solution is used by an organization, or group, to maintain or resume a predetermined level of operations during or after a disruptive event. All risks that can potentially impact the business during or following an event are identified.

Using BCM, organizations can build a framework for identifying critical assets and processes and creating company-wide business continuity plans.

BCM helps organizations to:
  • Centralize business continuity data
  • Perform business impact analyses to determine criticality of people, processes, and assets
  • Develop business continuity plans, including, but not limited to, preparedness for disaster recovery, communication plans, equipment checklists, emergency readiness, employee logistics, and vendor checklists
  • Identify relevant plans and stakeholders by using trigger events
  • Run workflows to automate critical processes
  • Test the effectiveness of your business continuity plan and identify and mitigate key risks
  • Visualize key planning and management activities with a user-friendly dashboard

BCM has built-in calculations to help organizations determine the criticality of processes to their business and generate impact tiers with acceptable thresholds. Pre-built workflows allow organizations to draft, review, approve, and publish plans with triggers for expiry and archival. These plans can be mapped to the client’s business impact analyses, policies, procedures, processes, locations, events, issues, and tests.

Take a look at BCM

This video provides an overview of BCM:

This video provides an overview of BCM.

User profiles

BCM includes two profiles:

  • OpenPages BCM Master profile
  • OpenPages BCM End User profile

The OpenPages BCM Master profile includes the fields and configuration required for BCM.

This profile includes:

  • My Work tab, Dashboard tab, and all home page tabs
  • Dependent fields and dependent pick lists
  • Detail, Context, Folder, Overview, Filtered List, and List Views

The OpenPages BCM End User profile has read-only access and is intended for employees who need to view business continuity plans.

Dashboards

BCM includes two dashboards:

  • OpenPages BCM Master dashboard
  • OpenPages BCM End User dashboard

The OpenPages BCM Master dashboard provides a high-level overview of the different business continuity activities in your organization. A business continuity manager can use the dashboard to manage tasks and stay informed of the activities of the business continuity program.

The OpenPages BCM End User dashboard is intended to be used by employees who need to view business continuity plans. The end user can search for applicable plans and mark specific documents as favorites.

Sample workflows

BCM includes the following sample workflows:

Business Continuity Plan Review and Approval Process

This workflow allows the user to start the review and approval process for a new or published Business Continuity Plan (BC Plan).

For a new BC Plan, the workflow guides the process through the in progress, in review and approval stages. The author, reviewer, and approver are required fields to advance the workflow. Upon completion of the process, the workflow sets the next review date to 365 days and the status to published.

For a published BC Plan, the user has two options:

  • Renew the current BC Plan without making changes to the published version

    If this option is selected, a comment is required by the reviewer and the workflow sets the next review date to 365 days. The workflow advances the process to require only an approval.

  • Revise the published BC Plan

    If this option is selected, the workflow “locks” the current BC Plan, makes a copy of the plan, and sets the status of the copied plan to draft.

    The copied draft version of the plan moves through the review and approval process of the workflow. Upon completion, the workflow sets the plan status to “published”, increments the version number, and sets the next review date to 365 days. The status of the previously published plan is set to archived.

Note: The following child associations that were present on the previous (“locked”) BC Plan also appear on the new version of the BC Plan: BCTest Plan, Teams, and Business Impact Analysis (BIA). All parent associations, with the exception of BC Events, are preserved for the new BC Plan.
Figure 1. Business Continuity Plan Review and Approval Process workflow
The View Designer shows the stages in the workflow: Start, In Progress, In Review, Approval, and End.
Business Impact Analysis to Determine Critical Processes
This workflow moves the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) through a review and approval process. A calculation on the BIA object is required to move it to the approval phase. After approval, two of the resulting values of the calculation, Impact Tier and Maximum Acceptable Outage, are saved on the Process parent of the BIA object.
Figure 2. Business Impact Analysis to Determine Critical Processes workflow
The View Designer shows the stages in the workflow: Start, In Progress, In Review, Approval, and End.
Business Continuity Test Result Reporting
This workflow allows the user to move document test results through a review and approval process.
Figure 3. Business Continuity Test Result Reporting workflow
The View Designer shows the stages in the workflow: Start, Document Results, Document Issues, and End.

Cognos report

BCM includes one out-of-the-box Cognos report. The report is located on the Business Continuity Plans object, and the link to it is named Print BC Plan Details. The link generates a Cognos Report with the Business Continuity Plan object details in PDF format.

Calculation on the Business Impact Analysis object

A calculation is defined on the Business Impact Analysis object. It assigns a suggested Impact Score, Impact Tier, and Maximum Acceptable Outage for a Process.

A user completes a business impact analysis to determine the criticality of a process or an asset or resource. The user provides a Contract/Regulatory Requirement, Financial Impact, and Reputation Impact. Each of those answers has a previously assigned weighted score. Based on the answers chosen, the calculation adds the three weighted scores to generate an Impact Score. Impact Score has a range of 0-15. Based on that range, an Impact Tier is assigned. Lastly, based on the Impact Tier, the calculation generates a Maximum Acceptable Outage (measured in days).

The following example shows the results of the calculation in the Impact Score, Impact Tier, and Maximum Acceptable Outage fields, given the input provided by the user.

Figure 4. Calculation results
A Task View shows a calcuatlion that has provided an Impact Sxcore, Impact Tier, and Maximum Acceptable Outage.

The calculation can be changed to meet your requirements. For more information about the GRC Calculations feature, see GRC Calculations.