Editor's Note

Maurine Dyer, Editor DRIE Toronto Digest, CBCP MBCI CRISC CI

Welcome to our December 2021 issue of the DRIE Toronto Newsletter!
It’s been a long and winding road this year, and this is just about my longest editorial since I became the Editor for the DRIE Digest.  In my opinion salient topics and issues of the year are those around the global pandemic and its implications for health and safety, work-area locations, emergency communications as well as information and communications technology.
 
HEALTH and SAFETY
In Canada, Federal, Provincial and Municipal Health and Safety Rules vary by location, and organizations are required to comply with occupational health and safety legislation. In almost all cases, workers (including contractors) have:

• a right to know their exposures to health and safety hazards and what to do in the case of an emergency 
• a right to participate in health and safety procedures and practices
• and a right to refuse to operate in unsafe work environments 

In the context of a never-ending global influenza pandemic, most employers have done a good job in complying with applicable laws and contractual arrangements. However, with the increasing growth of functional job-specialization, not all employees are cross-trained in each other's tactical responsibilities. Traditional business impact analysis documents are also not designed to identify common points of failure if specific employees (who support mission-critical activities) are temporarily or permanently unavailable. 
 
WORK AREA LOCATIONS
In response to the global pandemic, many organizations have changed their business models and have accelerated their switch: 

• from paper documents to digital documents and communication flows
• from physical face-to-face interactions with customers to digital communication flows
• from the exchange of cash, coin and cheques to card-based or digital payment alternatives
• from on-site-delivery of goods and services, to drive-through pickup or courier delivery of purchased goods and services.

Approximately 60 percent of federal government employees have proven their ability to effectively operate from remote (work-from-home) locations. And in the financial services sector, over 90 percent of the floor space used for centralized back-office operations, customer contact centers, trading floors, or computing support centers have largely remained empty since March 2020.
 
These changes have placed considerable reliance on the 24 x 7 x 365 availability and reliability of electrical supplies and telecommunication networks.  The employee's home is now the primary work-area.  And many legacy business continuity plans have not yet been amended and tested to address emerging threat scenarios. 
 
 
EMERGENCY NOTIFICATIONS
The key secret of success in responding to disruptive events is everyone knowing what to do in an emergency situation.  And with employees working remotely, organizations now have many alternative methods of communicating with their staff and contractors.  These include emails, text messages, phone calls and software collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Google Meets, Zoom, social media etc. These tools allow anytime/anywhere communication connectivity between staff, managers and executives.  Also, the effective use of configuration management tools like ServiceNow eliminate the need for legacy business continuity planning documents to be cluttered with redundant (and often obsolete) information on each employee's end-point devices, business application software, business data stores and emergency contact information.
 
However, some organizations still rely on legacy call-tree lists, which are often in the form of spreadsheets with data fields containing personally identifiable information.  These organizations have not yet embraced automated notification tools which provide the ability to:

• eliminate the need for manual, sequential and cascading communications from managers to subordinates 
• accelerate statistical reporting on which employees were (or were not successfully contacted)
• centrally disseminate emergency notifications that are edited, vetted and approved by the organizations legal and corporate communications specialists 

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESILIENCE
Regulators around the world are publishing improved expectations for improved resilience capabilities for vital infrastructure.  And in an increasingly digitized world, traditional business continuity management deliverables are becoming subsumed in projects, initiatives and tactics which address an increasing variety of threats to the resilience capabilities of:

• storage systems containing digital scripts, executable and source code, digitized records, files, and folders
• networks which send, receive, process and produce digital voice recordings, data and images at high speed and high quality
• physical facilities which contain people, processes, information software and equipment that are vital to internal and external supply chains   

The core principles and practices of the business continuity management profession must adapt to and adopt these changes.  Let's see what the future holds.
 
I encourage you to attend our upcoming webinars and send your articles us to share with the DRIE community. Keep Safe!