Tag: Automotive

What’s the difference between Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR)?

What’s the difference between Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR)? This is a question I have had to answer multiple times. It is a very good question and the answer is not simple! So, as a good lazy ‘techy’, I tried to find the answer on the web. That way, when I am asked, all I would have to do is send a link.

I have used this approach multiple times for other questions I have received. It is convenient and a great way to avoid re-typing an answer. However, this time, I was not very successful in my quest to find an answer. I searched the web, multiple times, for hours without finding the perfect “pre-written answer” I was looking for. So I decided to stop being lazy and write it myself.

Now, if you are like me, and you’ve been looking for an answer to this question, feel free to use this one.

So, let’s start with a few definitions from the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) Glossary:

Disaster Recovery (DR): “The strategies and plans for recovering and restoring the organizations technological infrastructure and capabilities after a serious interruption. Editor’s Note: DR is now normally only used in reference to an organization’s IT and telecommunications recovery.”

Business Continuity (BC): “The strategic and tactical capability of the organization to plan for and respond to incidents and business disruptions in order to continue business operations at an acceptable predefined level.”

First, I’d like to say that I have a slightly different view of DR than BCI. Now, who am I to disagree with what BCI is saying? Well, bear with me a little longer and you will see how my interpretation of DR might help people understand the differences between DR and BC better. So here’s my definition:DR is the strategies and plans for recovering and restoring the organizations (scratch technological) infrastructures and capabilities after an interruption (regardless of the severity).

Unlike the BCI, I don’t make a distinction between the technological infrastructure and the rest of the infrastructures (the buildings for example) and nor I do differentiate between the types of interruptions. In my opinion, either a system is down or a building is burnt or flooded, both should be considered a disaster and therefore both require a disaster recovery plan.

Therefore DR is the action of fixing a failing, degraded or completely damaged infrastructure. For example, the 2nd floor of a building was on fire; the fire is now out so the initial crisis is over. Now the damage caused by fire must be dealt with; there is water and smoke on the 2nd floor, the 3rd floor has damages caused by smoke and the 1st floor has water damage. The cleanup, replacement of furniture, repair of the building and its structure, painting, plastering, etc. are all part of the disaster recovery plan.

What is Business Continuity then? Business Continuity is how you continue to maintain critical business functions during that crisis. Back to the example, when the fire started, the alarm went off and people were evacuated from the building. Let say you had a Call Center on the 2nd floor and this just happens to be a critical area of your business. How would you continue to answer calls while people are being evacuated? How would you answer calls while the building is being inspected, repaired or rebuilt? Keeping the business running during this time is what I call Business Continuity.

The same approach can be taken with a system crash or when the performance of a system has degraded to the point that it has impacted business operations. So fixing the system is DR and the action of keeping the business operations running without the system being available is BC.

In conclusion, BC is all about being proactive and sustaining critical business functions whatever it takes whereas DR is the process of dealing with the aftermath and ensuring the infrastructure (system, building, etc.) is restored to the pre-interruption state.

Should Business Strategy be Influenced by Technological Considerations?

Submitted by phay on Fri, 11/04/2011 – 09:01

Can business strategy be created in isolation of the technology considerations? There is a widespread belief in the Business Community that Business Strategy comes first and then technology follows in some way to support that business.

In my experience the common perception among organizations is that Business defines its strategy first and then technology enables the strategy.

Strategy Development Process:

In order to explore the role technology plays in shaping and supporting the business, let’s look at how strategies are developed.  There has been a significant amount of research done and published in understanding how strategies are developed.  Here are some relevant highlights.

There are two main dimensions to strategy development.

  1. Visionary thinking based on intuition, a sense, an ability to make bold predictions and define goals.
  2. Strategy development is largely based on scientific analysis, considering options and recommendations based on the analysis followed by implementation.
    • Strategic Analysis guided by scientific approach understanding your markets, competitors, value chain, bargaining power of the key stakeholders.  It also entails understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your organization against the opportunities and threat that the external environment presents
    • Strategy Formulation guided by analytical findings, alignment to the vision and overall goals of the organization to create a strategic road-map
    • Strategy Implementation is of course converting the strategy to real results by successfully implementing the strategy

It is the strategy development that is the focus of this article. Specifically, strategic analysis which then guides the strategy formulation and implementation.

Is there a place for technological consideration in strategic analysis? The answer is quite apparent as demonstrated through examples next.

Technological Influences on the Business Landscape

Examples of technologies that have had transformation impact on business value chain and have redefined markets and distribution channels are all around us.

The globalization phenomenon enabled by the internet is one of most profound. The Internet has impacted all the traditional dimensions of business strategy (reduction in barriers to entry, increased market size across the globe without limitations of geographic divide, increased competition etc.).

Financial services industry is a prime example of an industry where technology has transformed the value chain, redefined competitive forces and given the consumers tremendous amount of bargaining power.  Entry barrier have been declining, new competitor have emerged. Some financial products and services have become more transparent and commodities making the market more competitive. Internet as a tool to create a new service delivery channel (reduced channel costs, 24 by7 availability) has put pressure on the more traditional branch based channels. The resulting service delivery cost structure has changed. ING is operating on the model that bricks and mortar are not required to sell its banking products and services.

Healthcare value chain has been transformed by technological advances, linking healthcare records through electronic information exchange, diagnostic imaging from traditional film based to digital imaging has redefined the value chain and changed the balance of power between the suppliers, buyers not to mention the very nature of the products and services being delivered.

Retail Industry is another such example where technology has changed the business landscape.  Amazon’s strategic business model was completely defined by technology.

Relationship between Business and Technology

Given how profoundly technology has influenced our business and personal lives, it is hard to fathom how a successful business strategy can be defined without considering technological influences and enablers.  By creating a partnership between Business and Technology at the Strategy development stage, you are creating a strategy that is well formed and can maximize business value and competitive positioning by embedding technological considerations from the very start (and not an after thought!).

So why is it that there is a significant divide between the Business and Technology?  In subsequent articles, I will focus on why there is this barrier (real or perceived) that creates this divide between Business and Technology.

If you have examples to demonstrate the benefits of business/technology partnerships, please share your thoughts on this forum.

Calculating the Value of Content in ECM

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Fri, 06/04/2010 – 08:47

It’s only worth expending effort to manage something if it has value – usually positive, but sometimes negative. So the concept of content value is implicit in enterprise content management (ECM).On the other hand, the value of a given content object (i.e. digital file) such as an email or document generally declines over time – or at least this is the common wisdom. I have seen graphs drawn mapping ‘value’ over ‘time’, with a smooth decline of value tending to zero. However, such a representation is clearly an average of value across many types of enterprise content.If you look at individual pieces of content, then you’ll find different profiles:

  • In compliance, a piece of content may retain 100% of its value for a defined period of years and then abruptly drop to having no value, or even having negative value (liability) that should trigger its destruction
  • In knowledge management, a piece of content may have declining value over time, but then because of some new event may suddenly have increased value

But this perspective is of the Inherent or Independent Value of a piece of content – the value is assessed entirely based on the information contained in the object. But it seems to me that there are at least two other factors that impact value:

  • Context – when correctly combined with other prices of content a given piece of content may have greater value. For example a specifications document is more valuable together with the associated requirements document. Value can often be realized by the way in which context is presented between content items – how they are grouped, ordered or ranked.
  • Impairment – Ironically, the value of a piece of content may be impaired by efforts to manage content. If you mix valuable pieces of content with large amounts of irrelevant materials, that should have been destroyed, you reduce the chances that the valuable content can be found and its value realized. Keeping everything is usually a bad idea. And often users impair value when they misclassify content.

So the available value of a piece of content to an organization may be expressed as follows:Available Value = Inherent Value x Context / Impairment What this says is that content management efforts can be beneficial, but if not done well can actually be destructive.

The biggest changes sneak up on you

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Tue, 11/17/2009 – 10:20

Content management (ECM) systems can track everything that a user does. Usually this capability is seen in the context of compliance – you can answer the ‘who did what’ and ‘when did they do it’ questions. You can also track changes in what users did over time. And so it is that a colleague was able to track how my behaviour has been changing without me noticing it by reporting on how many documents I deposit.

  • A bit of background: I use a number of Open Text Content Server systems. One of these, nicknamed Ollie, is used to support to support content-centric business processes within Open Text. I have authored many documents, mostly in MS Office formats over the course of my nine years with the company.

The ‘aha’ moment: So when my colleague made a social networking post that he had found that I had deposited almost 700 documents in Ollie, I wasn’t surprise. I was surprised though when he pointed out that I hadn’t added any documents in the last month! Zero! None!This of course got me to think: “What had I been doing?”He asked if I’d mostly moved to social networking-style tools. But no, I’ve been using collaborative tools of one form or another fairly consistently, and indeed heavily, over the last decade. What I realized as that I have almost entirely shifted to using wikis in place of documents.

  • A bit more explanation is in order. Content Server (formerly Livelink) is a full-featured ECM system. You can add documents of any type, including of course MS Office files. You can also directly author in wikis. On the collaborative/social networking side you can also post to a range of collaborative tools such as forums, discussions, news channels, blogs, etc., and with more recent additions instant messages, status posts, etc. So a user has a range of content and social tools in the same system to use – they can select whatever they feel most suited to the business task at hand. Given these choices you can then track user preference changes over time by analyzing audited events.

On further reflection it shouldn’t have been surprising. Once I used to have the Word and PowerPoint applications open all the time. I would typically send documents to colleagues as email attachments or via links to copies in Ollie.Now I create wiki pages and then rely on automated notifications and RSS for others to learn about them, and of course push awareness by targeted emails. I very seldom open Word to author content, and when I do I get frustrated because all of the embedded code makes it hard for me to reuse the content (unless I force Word to the blog posting mode as I’m doing now).That’s another thing – I repurpose content to multiple channels much more than I used to. I don’t simply author ‘free-standing’ documents and then deposit and email them. I often use the same content in several blogs and/or wikis.And now I’m starting to create short videos where once I’d have authored a document… None of this is surprising in an abstract sense. Pundits have been saying that there are huge changes underway and as someone who works in a company at the forefront of how content is managed in organizations, I’ve been aware of it and promoted it. I just hadn’t realized how much my own behaviour has changed; otherwise I wouldn’t have been surprised that I didn’t deposit a single document in Ollie last month!Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/