- Myth 1: Management Doesnt Care About Disaster Recovery
- Myth 2: Management Doesnt Understand a Disasters Impact on the Business
- Myth 3: Management Will Never Fund a Recovery Plan
- What Should Be Included in a Business Impact Analysis?
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Myth 3: Management Will Never Fund a Recovery Plan
It has been my experience that people who strike out on funding year after year have something very wrong with how they’re asking for money. Everyone will agree that the last thing management wants to endorse is money down a rat hole. If you don’t have your facts straight, that’s just how your funding request can be taken. If you can apply a proposed expenditure to a problem that everyone in the room agrees needs to be addressed, your plan will be funded. Executives are not in those seats because they’re bashful, and under the circumstances they will spend money.
So how do you convince management of the legitimacy of your request? What kinds of facts are most relevant and important to management?
Fundamentally, management needs to know only four things in order to decide whether to fund your plan:
- What can happen? (Fire, flood, hurricane, sabotage, etc.)
- What is the probability that it will happen? (Expressed best in percent probability of the event in a given year.)
- What does it cost when it happens? (Think in terms of lost sales, market share, employee productivity, and customer confidence.)
- What does preventing it cost? (Present a high-level overview of the proposed protective system, procedure, or function.)
There is a possible fifth question you can also address:
- What are the other factors? (Consider legal liability, government requirements, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.)