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By
Hank Marquis
Throughout the ITIL, you see
Impact
Analysis or
Business Impact Analysis
(BIA) as critical to effective IT decision making, and invaluable to
overcoming objections. However, few actually know how to perform a BIA; and
fewer that a BIA is not something you do by yourself!
The
BIA measures and reports on the possible affects associated with changes or
disruptions to IT Services, processes, or Configuration Items (CIs). The
purpose of BIA is to speed, ease and improve decision making while reducing
errors.
Learning how to standardize BIA can dramatically improve your process for
making good IT decisions. Of course, better decision making improves the
efficiency and effectiveness of all the ITIL processes.
Like
many aspects of the ITIL, BIA is something you can standardize and formalize
into a repeatable process.
The
following 6 steps provide a very effective template for sound IT decision
making and creating a sound BIA process.
The following 6 steps
provide a very effective template for sound IT decision making and creating
a sound BIA process.
- Establishment
-- Working with management and customers agree to a method of
representing business impact, and representatives who can assist in the
BIA. If you have not already done so, involve Change and Configuration
Management in this process.
- Choose and agree to one way to
express the “cost of downtime” -- dollars, time, lost customers,
impacted user minutes, etc. Don’t forget to include both “hard” and
“soft” costs such as market position, industry reputation, customer
perception, and legal loss potential into your conversations about
“cost of downtime.”
- Select those IT Services the
business feels critical to their success, include those “internal”
IT Services IT feels are critical as well.
- Determine BIA Team membership.
BIA requires a team. Identify those people who can review proposals
and provide clear and accurate assessment of potential impact to
their area of expertise -- CAB members and delegates are a good
source of such people.
- Form Creation
-- Your goal is a repeatable BIA process, one accepted by management and
customers, so you need a form. An excel spreadsheet works nicely here.
- Create a new spreadsheet, and
add titles for goals, objectives, and scope to help you focus and
enforces a modular and repeatable process.
- Input each critical service on
a row. Input “cost of downtime” formula agreed with the business,
and a column “minutes of downtime.”
- Prepare a BIA Questionnaire.
It should include a cover memo that will contain an explanation of
the proposal, and an area for BIA Team responses.
You now have a
template that can calculate the “cost of downtime” in terms everyone
understands and agrees. This is the basis for your BIA.
- Data Gathering
-- The BIA is not something you do by yourself! A sound BIA needs to
involve those people involved in whatever you are analyzing. For each
BIA prepare a questionnaire, with a cover
memo detailing the proposal. Send the questionnaire to the BIA Team.
Ask them each to respond about:
- Impact to their functional area
(using the agreed “cost of downtime” metric)
- Additional expenses projected
(dollars, times, etc.)
- Their readiness
- Technology issues they perceive
- Any other issues (this is
important)
- Analysis
-- Review the information returned from the BIA Team questionnaire
carefully. The entire purpose is to improve decision-making. Using the
estimates from the questionnaire, update the spreadsheet. Tabulate and
total the results. You should now have a clear, unambiguous valuation
of the potential impact of the proposal. Now, you must validate your
findings before publishing them as fact.
- Validation
-- Failure to validate your findings with the BIA team is a critical
mistake. Often, participants will not agree with their original
estimates when they see the first analysis. Your goal is to achieve
accuracy, not consensus however.
- Publishing
-- Send the completed BIA report to all those who participated, as well
as whomever will actually use the BIA to make a decision. Use any
accepted reporting format, but be sure to include a summary, the
objectives, and scope of the BIA, as well as the input from the BIA
Team. Readers of the report may choose to contact those organization
particularly impacted by the proposal.
A BIA performed in this manner is easy
and inexpensive to produce as it uses standard office tools. The standard
format and process means each BIA will be consistent, and aids in correct
decision-making.
Decision makers will come to rely upon
your BIA, and the team approach takes into account the concerns of the
organizations involved — making it easier to overcome resource,
scheduling and cost objections!
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