Earlier this year when pandemic broke out organizations around the world were dramatically reminded of the important role of operational resilience. As firms emerge from managing through this crisis, they are seeking ways to strengthen their ability to prevent and recover from business disruptions.

ServiceNow® BCM provides the foundation to embed resilience into daily operations.

In late 2019 ServiceNow acquired Fairchild Resiliency Systems, an innovator in the field of BCM software With the Paris release we have incorporated the Fairchild code into the ServiceNow platform and redesigned the user interface to create a new and improved user experience and streamlined data model. This allows us to deliver great experiences to those on the front-line and other stakeholders.”.

Perform Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

BIAs allow you to establish continuity requirements by identifying time-sensitive activities in an organization, based on the impact stemming from a disruption. This capability includes identifying resource dependencies and establishing recovery time targets allowing you to prioritize critical business functions. ServiceNow BCM enables user to efficiently:

• Prioritize inventory of critical services, processes, applications, third parties, and physical locations
• Create dependency maps to prioritize tasks, develop recovery strategies, and allocate resources
• Quantify the impact of disruptions to set recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO)

Figure 1: Business impact analysis assigns customer support as mission critical

Create and maintain continuity plans

To give your organization the best shot at success during a disaster you need a current plan accessible to all personnel responsible for carrying out any part of the plan. ServiceNow BCM makes it easy to create and equally important keeping the plans up to date. ServiceNow BCM enables user to efficiently:

• Plan communication call-trees, define secondary sites, and prepare runbooks for use during a crisis
• Rely on data that is accurate, complete, and timely from your ServiceNow configuration management database (CMDB)
• Apply a consistent set of plan standards to meet regulatory and stakeholder expectations

Figure 2: Continuity plan dashboard and with drill down into supporting details.

Conduct plan exercises

Performing BCM plan exercises is critical to ensure a controlled, coordinated, and communicated response to incidents or crises, and provide assurance there is appropriate resilience and disaster recovery capability in place. ServiceNow BCM enables organizations to validate operational effectiveness of continuity plans by performing test and live plan exercises. ServiceNow BCM enables user to efficiently:

• Improve effectiveness and usability of plans during simulated and actual crisis events
• Create digital workflows that define processes and roles while creating audit trails
• Speed remediation by Identify and closing plan gaps

Figure 3: Findings of test results for site reliability

Manage through crisis

Effective crisis management is essential to protect your workforce, customers, and stakeholders. ServiceNow BCM delivers the potential to greatly reduce the amount of damage an organization receives as a result of the crisis and may even prevent an incident from ever developing into a crisis. ServiceNow BCM allow users to efficiently:

• Minimize unavailability of critical business functions and processes
• Communicate to impacted party’s real-time information they need to respond
• Accelerate crisis response with plans that are complete, accessible, and tested

Figure 4: Monitoring and reporting of crisis across sites by geography

ServiceNow Applications

The Paris release of BCM will be available on the ServiceNow Store in mid October. To improve customer experience and facilitate targeted releases the Paris release features individual applications for each of the following core functions:

• Business Impact Analysis
• Business Continuity Planning
• Crisis Management

Learn more

We’d like to show you everything we’ve got in Paris that helps make ServiceNow BCM a business enabler not a business disruptor. To learn more visit ServiceNow website or view our brief 5 to 10 minute on-demand demos. We also encourage you to contact your ServiceNow account team to learn more.