B2CS Africa Clearview

Clearview

ClearView was designed from the ground up to help organizations nurture a culture of resilience without being an unwelcome intrusion upon the day-to-day work life of the business users who must contribute to the planning process. This tension between sophisticated plans based upon a deep understanding of the organization on the one hand; and simple, unobtrusive, intuitive planning on the other, is uniquely and brilliantly solved by ClearView.

Clients are offered unmatched flexibility in the development of the ‘wizard-like’ questionnaires that are distributed to users. This means that even complex, global businesses can accommodate its BCM needs in a single tool without costly custom developments. ClearView’s modernity and flexibility means that it helps clients comply with BCM best practice and corporate standards, while facing the inevitable need for greater cost-efficiencies. ClearView is quite simply an end to end solution.

It manages the following aspects of the BC lifecycle:

Program and Policy Management
Risk assessment
BIA
Planning
Exercising
Incident and Crisis Management
Reporting for continuous improvement

Continuous Resilience Improvement

Many organizations are quite aware of the need to improve key business processes, whether via six-sigma type approaches, lean techniques, SPC etc., or even fundamental re-engineering. But all of these methodologies focus on the ‘business-as-usual’ efficiency rather than resilience. Indeed, there is nothing in any of these approaches that will ensure that a process modification leaves the business less vulnerable to disruption, whether caused by internal or external factors.

Such resilience enhancements are left to the Business Continuity and Risk groups within the business, and ISO 22301:2012 Clause 10 specifies the need for continuous improvement in the Business Continuity field.

Does your BC Program accommodate and encourage such improvement? Does your BC software platform support it? Very often BC teams struggle to ensure that continuous resilience improvement forms part of their BC Program because their tools and remit focus on managing ‘completeness’ and ‘currency’ of plans. Whilst these are important measures, on their own they sometimes fail to optimize the plans and the changing face of any business.

Although we cannot enhance the authority and scope of the BC group, ClearView does provide its clients with powerful tools to highlight opportunities for improvement, to present them to the Risk Committee, and to ‘workflow’ them to completion. These may be simple ‘action activities’ which arise from the day-to-day BC Plan Management or they may be more fundamental BC Risk issues which impact directly on the effectiveness of plan execution.

In respect of the latter, not only does ClearView provide key workflow and Certification dashboards showing the key status indicators of all activities in the program, from risk assessment through to BIA, Planning, Exercise and Incident Management, but there is also a ‘Non-conformance’ dashboard of improvement tasks that are being considered or actioned. These ‘non-conformances’ / ‘non-conformities’ or core BCM risks can be identified by ClearView users from all points in the BC Program.