Business Continuity For Dummies

Identifying and Prioritising Your Critical Activities through a BIA

A Business Impact Analysis is a method of understanding your business – a scheme to collect information on your key products and services and prioritise them and the critical activities that support them. A common way to go about doing this is to use a questionnaire and follow up with face-to-face meetings with your staff. You can then measure the impact to your business of your critical activities being disrupted by working out the time that your business can survive without them, along with the level to which you need to restore them.

The BIA may sound very grand but don’t be put off! We show you how to work out your key products and services in the earlier section ‘Protecting Against the FORCES of Disruption’ and we help you with your critical activities in this one.

Although many of your key products and services are no doubt obvious to you, the critical activities upon which they depend may not be so clear. A BIA helps you understand the crucial activities so that you can deal with the most important things first when disruption hits.

Time is an important factor here because you’re hunting for the answer to the following question: ‘What’s going to have the greatest impact on your business in the shortest amount of time?’

Another advantage is that people sometimes get distracted by recent events or their particular ...