Journal of business continuity & emergency planning最新文献

A pandemic is a unique natural disaster that will pose challenges for any organisation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, organisations of all types have struggled to maintain operations while assuring the health and wellbeing of the various persons who work on their behalf. Certainly, many organisations have found that their risk management and business continuity plans fail to consider adequately the disruption associated with a pandemic caused by a novel pathogen. As this paper discusses, this suggests a need to revisit risk assessments and business impact analyses; the assumptions and timeframes on which they are based; and the plans that they have generated. The paper argues that static plans are ill-suited to address the evolving threat of pandemic, and that effective planning and management of pandemic response must be dynamic in nature.

This case study looks at a denial-of-access event, where airborne asbestos material was found in a government-owned building leased by the New Zealand Parliamentary Counsel Office (PCO). The paper describes how despite the lack of advance notice, the PCO demonstrated its resilience to business disruption through its leadership and culture; its networks and relationships; and being change-ready. The paper also discusses how the incident provided an unexpected opportunity to build further resilience on return to the workplace.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a global surge in the development and implementation of digital interventions to diagnose, track, prevent and mitigate the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. To date, however, there has been little research to characterise the vast scope and scale of these novel, ad hoc and widely varied digital tools. This paper helps fill this gap by providing a descriptive summary of the digital response to COVID-19. The research finds that the digital response can be broken into four main categories: 1) tracking the spread of the virus (contact tracing); 2) controlling social behaviour during the outbreak (social behaviour monitoring); 3) information gathering and dissemination about the virus (one-way and two-way public communications); and 4) diagnosis and treatment (remote diagnostics and treatment). This paper describes the four response categories and provides examples of the digital technologies being developed and implemented for these purposes. This descriptive understanding provides a contextual foundation for subsequent research to analyse the opportunities and challenges associated with the development, implementation and uptake of digital interventions, alongside the development of analytical frameworks and guidance.

Defining resilience has remained a challenge despite decades of research across multiple disciplines. This paper proposes that resilience can be better understood when examined through the framework of communication. Resilience is proposed to have three interconnected domains (community, organisation and individual) and two dimensions (physical and social-emotional). This work focuses on the social-emotional components of enacted organisational resilience. The impact of organisational culture on sensemaking, organisational narrative and resilience strategies is explored. Communication-based interventions that organisations can make to improve resilience are identified.

Exercise GTA Unified was a functional, multi-agency, cross-jurisdictional, health-sector focused mass casualty preparedness exercise conducted in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) on 28th November, 2019. With over 1,000 unique paper-based and electronic injects and 34 participating agencies, including 22 separate hospital sites, Exercise GTA Unified is likely the largest health-sector focused mass casualty preparedness exercise ever conducted in Canada. The exercise design approach supported a successful, objective-based functional exercise, with elements of marked realism for participants. The exercise offered a unique opportunity to collect data for future analysis and the insights gained will have a transformative impact on interagency engagement and cooperation for emergency response planning. Furthermore, the approach adopted for the exercise is affordable, reproducible, scalable and transferrable to sectors beyond the health system. This paper provides a detailed review of the key planning and design components adopted in the development and implementation of the exercise, as well as practical insights for the design and conduct of multi-agency, cross-jurisdictional functional exercises.

To extort a ransom payment, ransomware actors must make the threat sufficiently compelling that payment seems like the only option. This is achieved by encrypting or disabling a company's data replicas and backups as well as its production data - data that are essential to the organisation's success. To prevent this happening, it is essential to extend one's thinking beyond the organisation's cyber security incident response plan and disaster recovery programme and give active consideration to a cyber incident recovery risk management (CIR-RM) programme. This paper explores what this requires, including the right thinking, the right approach, the right team and the right plan.

The mantra from emergency management professionals is that lessons learned when enacted are beneficial; when they are not, it is a lesson observed. The COVID-19 pandemic has required healthcare organisations to be agile and responsive. This paper describes how Alberta Health Services leveraged the lessons learned from previous incidents in order to provide a flexible response to a rapidly evolving situation.

The decision to automate any part of a resilience programme may be straightforward, but translating that decision into a successful software selection and implementation demands complete, detailed scoping and a commitment to a culture of ongoing change and improvement. This paper provides an approach to the design of supporting reporting and data frameworks and models, up to the point of requests for information or proposal. It also provides suggestions on embedding an ongoing change process, and guidance and watch-points at each stage. This should in turn ensure that software selection is informed and successful, and that subsequent change is managed successfully.