Enterprise Risk Assessment and Business Impact Analysis: Best Practices

More than ever, the basic lesson for business managers and for business continuity professionals is: anything can happen! This book is a guide to best practices in understanding risk and business impact. It provides essential guidance for the identification, management and control of risks confronting businesses --- What might happen? How will our enterprise be affected? What will the impact be? Answering these questions accurately and objectively is essential to Business Continuity Management, business success - and even business survival. The helpful examples all have their roots in real cases and come heavily laden with pragmatism. Over fifteen years experience in blue chip environments, large and small, public and private, has gone into developing the methods described. Others come with a respected pedigree from a variety of industries. Your own "right way" for risk management means picking, matching and tailoring from the cases, guidance and examples provided, and building on existing best practice within your organization. "This book is intended to provide guidance and examples for the identification, management and control of risks. Wherever practicable, we have used case studies and examples to illustrate the points. "It is impossible to cover every industry, every process and every activity in work of this sort. We have therefore made the work as comprehensive as practicable and focused particularly on those risk areas of generic value to the reader, while providing references and case studies relevant to specific market sectors. "Many examples are provided throughout this guide: these all have their roots in real cases and come heavily laden with pragmatism. Over fifteen years experience in blue chip environments, large and small, public and private, has gone into developing some of the methods described. Others come with a respected pedigree from a variety of industries. Your own "right way" for risk management means picking, matching and tailoring from the cases and examples provided and building on existing best practice within your organization. "Where practicable we have provided examples of different methodologies so that the one most appropriate to the reader's organization's business continuity maturity and culture can be selected. The author is also conscious that it can only be a partial picture of what is a global business continuity industry. However, we have tried to be representative as far as practicable, illustrating issues, approaches and requirements from various countries."

Andrew Hiles, FBCI, is founder and Chairman of Survive, the international user group for business continuity planning and was a founding Director of the Business Continuity Institute, the international body for certification of business continuity professionals. He is a founder Director of Kingswell, international consultants. Having commenced his management career with the Royal Air Force, he pioneered IT systems before leaving to take up a position within the Finance Department of London Transport. Subsequently in their Central Productivity Unit he was a Senior Projects Manager and later became responsible for the business re-engineering function, implementing new services and major technical projects. He left to take up a position with the UK Post Office as their first Business Systems Consultant responsible for major projects. Andrew then joined the UK Atomic Energy Authority at the Harwell Laboratories where he managed the supercomputing, mainframe!! and other bureau and facilities management services.

Andrew was a founding director of Kingswell, an international consulting company with a blue chip client base specializing in Enterprise Risk Management, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery and in Service Management. Andrew is a pragmatic global consultant and trainer in these areas.

Andrew is an international speaker on risk management, business continuity and contingency planning and has featured on conference programs in the USA, Southern Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific Rim. He has presented workshops and seminars on these topics for Frost & Sullivan (Europe), IIR/ IFF (Europe and Middle East), AIC (South Africa), CEL (Hong Kong), UPOM (Saudi Arabia) and other companies having also lectured at Ashridge, Cranfield, GEC Dunchurch and Henley Management Colleges in the UK. He has broadcast on radio, TV and on Internet webinars.

He has over 300 published articles on business continuity. He is the author of Business Continuity Management: Best Practice, published by Rothstein Associates Inc. 2000, He co-edited and was the major contributor to The Definitive Guide to Business Continuity Management (published by Wiley, 1999) and The IBM GUIDE UK Disaster Recovery Manual. He contributed to the Confederation of British Industry business guide, Business Continuity Management and to the Institute of Directors / Department of Trade and Industry Business Continuity Guide.

Andrew is a Fellow of the Business Continuity Institute, a Member of the British Computer Society and a Freeman of the City of London.