Irreverence

posted on 11 February 2008 13:46

Most petitions on the Downing Street site are like boiler pressure valves; they let off steam but achieve little else.

That thought came to me as I read that ‘Business Continuity Expo 2008 – the risk management Expo – with backing from the business continuity community including www.continuitycentral.com and the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) have (sic; it’s ‘has’. BC Expo 2008 is an organisation and is singular, sigh.)  today set up a petition on the 10 Downing Street website to urge the Prime Minister to Create “a designated lead department within central government to coordinate, initiate and oversee business continuity management within all other government departments.”

What? In between sorting out Iraq and Adghanistan say.

‘The petition which is available to sign at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Continuity/ is pushing for a long-overdue department which would have specific responsibility for business continuity management.  Currently within Government, the responsibility for Business Continuity falls under the a wide range of Ministries, including but not limited to BERR, Cabinet Office, Communities and Local Government, Culture, Media and Sport, Defence, Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Health, Work and Pensions, Justice and Transport. There are so many departments that touch on aspects of business continuity demonstrating the breadth and importance of BC but no one body overseeing it all.’ 

BC Expo 2008 wants a single a department that has overall responsibility for business continuity.

 Richard Fitzhugh, the Content Manager at Business Continuity Exp0 2008, said: “Businesses are frankly confused. One of the top experts in the industry recently compiled an easy-to-use guide on who to call in an incident, intended as a wallpaper reference for BC practitioners. It ended up running to over 200pages – and this can’t be right.

Methinks that this is part of publicity for BC Expo 2008 and has as much chance of getting off the ground as a deckchair has of becoming a refrigerator. Why on earth should there be one government body overseeing business continuity? It seems a near-daft idea.