Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

A BIA seeks to identify a company’s most critical business service s through analysis of outage severity translated into a financial value, coupled with operational risk. This information can help shape and enhance operational performance by enabling better decision making regarding prioritization of incident handling, problem management focus, change and release management operations, project priority, and so on. It is a beneficial tool for identifying the cost of service outage to a company, and the relative worth of a service. These two concepts are not identical.

The cost of service outage is a financial value placed on a specific service, and is meant to reflect the value of lost productivity and revenue over a specific period of time. The worth of a service relative to other services in a portfolio may not result exclusively from financial characteristics. Service Value, as discussed earlier, is derived from characteristics that may go beyond Financial Management, and represent aspects such as the ability to complete work or communicate with client s that may not be directly related to revenue generation. Both of these elements can be identified to a very adequate degree by the use of a BIA. While this section will discuss and illustrate the output of, and approach to creating a BIA, the reader should realize that the examples of BIA format and output represented here are not the only options, and alternative formats are visible throughout industry.

A number of steps need to be completed while generating a BIA. Some of the high-level activities are as follows:

1. Arrange resource s from the business and IT that will work together on the analysis
2. Identify all of the top candidate services for designation as critical, secondary and tertiary (you do not need to designate them at this point)
3. Identify the core analysis points for use in assessing risk and impact, such as:
• Lost sales revenue
• Fines
• Failure risk
• Lost productivity
• Lost opportunity
• Number of user s impacted
• Visibility to shareholders, management etc.
• Risk of service obsolescence
• Harm to reputation among customers, shareholders and regulatory authorities
4. With the business, weight the identified elements of risk and impact
5. Score the candidate services against the weighted elements of risk and impact, and total their individual risk scores (you can utilize an FMEA for additional input here)
6. Generate a list of services in order of risk profile
7. Decide on a universal time period with which to standardize the translation of service outage to financial cost (1 minute, 1 hour, 1 day, etc.)
8. Calculate the financial impact of each service being analysed within the BIA using agreed methods, formulas and assumptions
9. Generate a list of services in order of financial impact
10. Utilize the risk and financial impact data generated to create charts that illustrate the company’s highest risk application s that also carry the greatest financial impact. A sample output from this analysis is shown in Figure 5.5.

Figure 5.5 Business Impact Analysis

Figure 5.5 displays services on a comparative scale using financial impact and risk priority (in this case the probability, detectability and impact of failure) as points of analysis. For those companies that are inclined and capable, the use of Six Sigma methodologies can bring additional rigour to a BIA exercise, such as the example above, by enabling a structured approach to assessing Failure Modes and Effects (FMEA).

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14