Monthly Archives: May 2012

The benefits of a deployable pool of volunteers

Last year, I had the amazing opportunity to work with many other volunteers in a large post-disaster recovery operation.   The disaster itself was a major event which affected a significant proportion of a town and its residents in northern Canada.   My role was to assist in the early days of the recovery effort once the situation had been stabilised and attention could be focussed on the longer term. I’ll probably write more about my experience as I found it quite fascinating and it has led me to do quite a bit of thinking about disaster response in general.   However, in this posting, I want to focus on the power of … Continue reading

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Presenting data: IT systems

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As part of determining the core business processes, you should also have collected the information technology systems those processes depend upon.   How do you intend to present that information? One option is simply a list of systems and associated values such as the number of people needing a given system and the time-lines of that need.   While technically complete and of crucial importance to your IT folk, a tabulated list is not terribly interesting when presenting your BIA results to, say, your senior executive.   Especially, as is likely, it is a very long list of all your hardware, software and infrastructure systems. What follows is a suggestion for presenting the … Continue reading

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So I’ve gathered my BIA data. Now what?

Gathering the BIA data can sometimes be intimidating enough that looking beyond to the reporting stage sometimes falls into the “I’ll think about that tomorrow” category.   However, at some point, you have to get there.   After all, you’ve invested a lot of time and effort in designing your questions, setting up the appointments and gathering the data.   If you wish to avoid leaving your stakeholders and sponsors with the impression that it has been a waste of time or, perhaps worse, a cosmetic box-ticking exercise, it is crucial that the reports be useful.   Even better is to produce a report which is both useful and intuitive. How much ability you … Continue reading

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Cognitive commission, not omission

The title of this comes from a phrase in an excellent book, The Character of Harms by Malcom Sparrow, which I read rather slowly some time back.   (The slowness was due to a) my having to read it between many other books and b) it not being the lightest of reading – not the quality of the writing .)   However, I was recently reading his chapter on “Catastrophic Harms” and he makes the point that decisions as to preventive action need to be consciously made.   I think his terminology is far more erudite and elegant than my equivalent phrase, “default decision”, but we are addressing the same issue. The problem arises in situations … Continue reading

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