The Misunderstood Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

What is a BIA? 

According to DRII and DRJ glossary of terms, a BIA is: A process designed to prioritize business functions by assessing the potential quantitative (financial) and qualitative (non-financial) impact that might result if an organization was to experience a business continuity event.

Penn State has adopted a 5-phase approach to business continuity planning.  See the Recovery Planning Process Flow Chart for the 5-phase process. The BIA is completed in Phase 2 of the process.  We provide departments and campuses with a survey that helps them identify the critical services they run within their area. They need to judge what the impact to Penn State would be both financially and operationally if that service is not operational for a specified period of time.  Peak periods of operation would need to be identified for each critical service. For example, students registering for classes would be a higher priority service at the beginning of the semester than the ability to post grades.  However, posting grades would take priority at the end of the semester when registering for classes would be lower priority.

A BIA is designed to help departments and campuses understand their "business" better and help them prioritize their critical services.  It will also help determine which services need funding for recovery strategies.

Why is the BIA misunderstood? 

If the BIA provides a lot of answers, then why is it the least understood. Most units want to skip this step primarily because they do not see the "value" or IT units do not want the business units to get involved.   

Most units feel they already understand their business and in most cases they are correct, but trying to prioritize services based on intuition does not provide concrete reasoning for decision-making. Nor can intuition explain how decisions were soundly justified after an event occurs and hindsight comes into play. Knowing up front what impacts would occur and what they would be, gives units the authority to make decisions that have the University's outcome in the best interest.

By understanding the priorities of the business units, IT can adjust their priorities and strategies to fit the business needs.  Also, cost can be evaluated based off of the time needed for recovery of the technology which supports the business requirements.  Typically, the faster you need technology the higher the cost to recover and vice versa.  If you need technology back fast, the BIA will provide the data that supports the reasoning for spending the money to recover quickly.

How can Administrative Information Services (AIS) help?

We work with departments and campuses to show them the how critical the the BIA is.  We also provide an easy method of collecting this information.  We provide a 20 question survey to managers within the departments and ask them to complete it.  This should take no longer than 4 hours to complete and is web-based.  Penn State uses Strohl Systems BIA Professional to create the survey, collect the data and analyze it. We hope that in making this process as "easy" as possible, units will start to see the benefit and will want the survey to assist them on many levels, from short term decision- making to long term strategy.

 Next week:  BIA and the RTO!