Brian Sommer and I have recorded 12 episodes in this series - see index here. Last couple of months, we have had several guests - Rob Kugel of Ventana, Josh Greenbaum of EA Consulting, Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel, Frank Scavo of Avasant, Dennis Howlett of Diginomica, Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras, Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research, Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere, Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters, Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy, Sandra Lo of Zoho, Bob Evans of Evans Strategic Communications and Paul Coetser of Big Blue Ventures
In the 26th episode of the series is Mark Smith, CEO and Chief Research Officer of Ventana Research. We discuss how Business Continuity plans performed in what I call a Black Swan(S) year. How do you plan for continuity, disaster recovery and contingencies given one crisis after another - health, financial, diversity, sustainability?
We discuss how various forms of planning performed, whether they are too siloed and whether we will revert to long term, econometric, scenario planning.
Even more than corporations, it would appear government bodies need to revisit BCP. Their guidance, especially around public health to citizens has been chaotic. Their guidance to corporations around site re-opening protocols has been conflicting. Mark comments how one positive from the chaos is increased public/private collaboration.
We discuss how technology vendors have stepped up, especially planning vendors and how vendors like Salesforce and Workday have delivered new health and diversity related offerings.
We cover a lot of ground - going forward we will need to balance the desire for continuity and predictability with the reality of continued chaos and need for agility. As Mark says "every day is a new day - the sun rises and the sun sets - and anytime in between something can go wrong"
