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 same information in a graphical format: a word-cloud. Also known as a “tag cloud”, you’ve probably seen them popping up on various web sites as a way of displaying links to various topics and their relative frequency.
Creating your own word-cloud of systems is fairly straight-forward. Various software is out there which will take a list of terms and return a word cloud arranged according to your specifications. The example image attached to this post uses relative size to capture the number of people using a given system and the colour to indicate the nature of the system (for example, hardware, web application, etc.). An alternative option would be to shade the systems in terms of how quickly they are needed: bright, saturated colours would indicate immediate need with pale, attenuated colours indicating a system only needed several weeks after an event. Or, let free your inner artist and choose your own parameters.
All that really matters is that the option makes sense to you and to those to whom you are presenting the data. Also, don’t be afraid of presenting the same data in different ways to different audiences.
The point of the exercise is to present your information in a way which is useful and clear.
Do you have any preferred ways of presenting data? If so, I’d enjoy chatting to you about them.
Good luck and have fun!