In the event of a widespread outbreak of swine flu expected this
autumn is your IT department ready and what are your business
planning assumptions? Here are eight top tips to ensuring business
continuity.
A human influenza
pandemic is considered a certainty - when it happens is uncertain.
It is estimated that illness will be highest among school children
(about 40%) and decline with age. Among working adults, an average
of 20% will become ill during an outbreak. People can transmit
infection for up to one day before the onset of illness. Viral
shedding and the risk of transmission will be greatest during the
first two days. Multiple waves (periods during which outbreaks
occur across the country) of illness could occur with each wave
lasting two to three months. For businesses, rates of absenteeism
will depend on the severity of the pandemic. If severe, absenteeism
attributable to illness, the need to care for others, public
transportation closures, may reach 40% during the peak of an
outbreak.
1. Continuity
Planning
Business
continuity planning for pandemic influenza is critical,
particularly in the IT department, as your organisation will be
relying on IT like never before. So identify a pandemic coordinator
and/or team with defined roles and responsibilities for
preparation and response planning immediately. The planning process
should include input from all relevant stakeholders in your
business including sub-contractors, outsourced services and the
logistic providers needed to maintain business operations by
location and function.
2. Business Impact
Talk to your
suppliers about their swine flu plans and identify alternate
suppliers. Train and prepare an ancillary workforce if necessary,
for example, using retirees who have left the company. Develop and
plan for scenarios likely to result in an increase or decrease in
demand for your products and/or services during a pandemic.
Determine potential impact on service delivery by using multiple
possible scenarios that affect different services, products or
production sites. Ask what would your department look like with a
20% or 40% cut in personnel and supplies?
3. Sustainable Plan
The critical
question to ask is: When the pandemic strikes how long can you
sustain service delivery? Any plan must include identification of
key contacts (with backups), chain of communications (including
suppliers and customers), and processes for tracking and
communicating business and employee status. Implement an exercise
to test your plan, and revise periodically. For a training drill
select 40% of your staff at random and see how your department
would function without them.
4. Preventative
Measures
Implement
guidelines to reduce the conduct of face-to-face contact for
example, no hand-shaking among employees and between employees and
customers. Critically, for IT and support staff there is the issue
of hygiene around work stations (contact with mice, keyboards and
shared resources like printers – invest heavily in antiseptic wipes
and introduce a culture of your staff regularly washing their
hands.
5.
Attention to
Detail
Critical to all this is the actual IT itself, or more importantly,
the operation and support of IT by people. You need to ask, how
hands on is your operation? For example, do backup tapes need to be
changed manually every day and what will happen if they are not
replaced? It is these types of details that need to be mitigated
against with planning and preparation.
6. Impact
Assessment
The key is to understand the impact on your department and have a
strategy in place to suit the business needs. It is often
underestimated how much human intervention is needed to keep IT
services running, particularly those housekeeping tasks. It might
be necessary in extreme circumstances to make fundamental changes
to the operating model and make it less ‘hands on’ for a defined
period of time whilst the risk of staff absenteeism is high. Some
tasks may be able to be done by non-IT staff. However, it is not
acceptable to grant non-IT staff systems administration authority,
so it is critical to identify vulnerable skill sets that are held
by key IT staff.
7. Failure
Points
Consider the impact of an IT component failure,
such as server, storage or network and the fact there may be no
engineers available to resolve the problem. Are there single points
of failure in your core infrastructure and implement greater
resilience where necessary.
8. Eight Point Plan for remote working during a Flu
Pandemic
1) Identifythe employees can easily
work remotely and enable them with the appropriate
resources.
2) Developa policy so that
both sides understand the terms under which remote working is
allowed and how much employees will be reimbursed for
heat/light/phone costs etc.
3) Undertakea Health and Safety risk
assessment for minimum working standards that employees
must comply with when working remotely.
4) Provide the necessary IT and telecoms tools
including call re-routing and wireless/ 3G data connection and
secure access to your corporate network.
5) Enableaccess to corporate
applications and data via a VPN or secure web-based email
systems (make certain your company directory is up-to-date).
6) Ensureremote workers do not get
isolated by facilitating tele/web conferencing and/or
instant messaging.
7) Manageremote workersby regular line management communication.
(Remember voice recording of re-routed calls and key stroke
monitoring can keep the lazy on the straight and narrow.)
8) Trustyour staff and don’t expect
them to be working the same way they do in the office.
However, what
issues might arise when remote access is oversubscribed? In many
organisations it’s the ‘road warriors’ who have been the main users
of remote access capability so you will need to plan for the most
productive use of resources to prevent a free for all as staff
compete for connectivity. The options are simple, increase capacity
(expensive in a recession) or clearly outline who has access when
and for how long.
RESOURCES
Government Guidance
Swine Flu and Business
The Flu Pandemic Game: a business continuity training
resource
Recession and Swine Flu
Picture credit: Jonathan Hordle/Rex Features