12-2 Business Continuity Management Program

BCM is a holistic management process that identifies potential impacts that threatens an organization and provides a framework for building resilience and the capability for an effective response that safeguards the interest of the organization’s key stakeholders, reputation, brand, and value-creating activities. BCM must be owned and fully integrated into the organization as an embedded management process. (Source: Business Continuity Institute.)

BCM is a management process that encompasses the following:

1. Resides within each organization and involves the protection of essential assets and continuity of business operations and services as a major responsibility to our customers, business partners, and employees.
2. Develops and maintains policies and procedures to support the resumption of critical, time-sensitive business processes, including critical business information systems and essential business functions, in the event of their disruption.
3. Includes the organization’s strategic and tactical plans; policy and procedures; risk and opportunities related to regulatory agencies; industry organizations; suppliers; business processes; and the business units, people, information resources, functions, activities, and facilities.
4. Integrates all disciplines from human and information resources, facility and security management to, crisis communications and public relations, business processes, functions, and information systems.

BCM is a single approach that joins the following major recovery services:

1. Business Recovery focuses on the business processes and procedures to ensure a comprehensive strategy that minimizes the risk and cost in case of a disruption of information technology service.
2. Disaster Recovery directs and guides appropriate actions for the recovery of essential information technology business functions and activities to ensure an orderly recovery from a wide range of potential emergencies or threats that affect the computing infrastructure.
3. Crisis Management ensures communications systems are in place to notify first responders, to keep employees informed, and to update business partners and clients.
4. Emergency Response provides evacuation procedures that identify type of evacuation, assembly points, and head-count activities.

Together, the services provide guidance to Postal Service organizations responsible for mission assurance functions to manage the recovery process during and after an incident.