The integral role that knowledge, data, information, and intelligence
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Abstract
Business continuity management has been a process that has been helping organizations to recover from disaster and normalize their operations. It is evident that tragedy is a risk that happens without notice and can happy anytime and in different forms. Therefore organizations got to have a better plan that will enable them to recover whenever disaster strikes an organization. The integral role that knowledge, data, information, and intelligence plays an important role when it comes to business continuity management by helping an organization to make better decisions in solving a problem. The paper will evaluate the part of the Integral role that knowledge, data, information, and intelligence in business continuity management.
Key words: Business Continuity Management, Knowledge, Data, Information, Intelligence, and Technology
Introduction
The advancement in technology has brought about many positive impacts on many business organizations. The positive impacts of the advancement in technology do not exempt the negative challenges that face organizations. Every business organization does have challenges they are facing, but how they handle the issue determines their fate in the competitive market. Therefore this forces the organization to have preparations and planning to maintain the normal functions of an organization even if they are faced with the challenges. The management of the organization also has a role to play by addressing the challenge before they happen and prevent it from happening. Today’s competitive and turbulent environment persuades every organization to implement a business continuity management system (BCMS) for dealing with disruptive incidents such as earthquakes, floods, and terrorist attacks (Rezaei et al., 2019). And in case the challenge occurs, they also find the best way to solve it and ensure the organization goes back to its regular operation. Leaders within an organization have a role to play in ensuring that business organization maintains regular operation or have minimal destructions during a disaster or a challenge.
It is miserable that a threat can strike anytime without giving notice on when they will attack. Business organizations do face many challenges, but when disasters occur, they do not give any notice on when they will strike. A business organization has to be prepared and make better plans to face a threat anytime they occur. Disaster can happen anytime, and they can unfold in different ways because every incident is unique and different in their ways. This is a situation where an organization needs a business continuity plan. This is a better plan that helps to give business organizations shot of success when a threat strikes.
Consequently, as an organization, it is essential to come up with a plan that will help in a normalizing situation in case a disaster happens. Not having a business continuity plan does not mean the organization will not necessarily recover from the accident, but it can be the collapse entirely of the organization. An effective Business Continuity Management system, including Knowledge Continuity Management, guarantees financial stability and legal responsibility for organizations and demonstrates that the organization uses all available safeguards to protect their employees, business interests and investments (Blyth, 2019)
With the advancement in technology, business organizations are prone to cyber-attacks of natural disasters that may end up affecting the normal operation of the business. Therefore business continuity management is essential because it helps business organizations deal with the potential threat and ensure business organization goes back to normal operation during a disaster. This approach to ensuring the continuity of critical processes is called “Business Continuity Management” (BCM), as discussed in Randeree et al. (2012). Business continuity management helps business organizations to identify functions that may threaten the operation of a business organization, minimize or prevent them from occurring hence coming up with a better framework that will enable the business organization to respond to a particular incident appropriately. The following are essential and vital components of business continuity management:
Having a better understanding of the organization- understanding the organization by using risk assessment and impacts of the business to identify the critical deliverables, evaluate priorities that will enable the organization to recover, and identify and assess the threats that may interrupt service delivery to customers.
Identifying business continuity management strategy- the organization should found out and come up with an alternative approach that will help loss mitigation, find out their potential effectiveness to deliver the essential organization functions.
Implementation and development of business continuity management- the organization should develop a response to the challenges of business continuity and create plans that underpin it.
Business continuity management maintenance and auditing-the organization should ensure that the plan for business continuity management is fit for the purpose, are qualified assured, and always up to date.
Establishing a business continuity management culture within the organization- the organization should ensure it uses trained staff and key stakeholders on business continuity management to ensure the continuity culture is embedded within the organization.
Concerning the information that is mentioned above, it is correct to consider business continuity as a political and strategic ability that a business institution takes into account interruptions and risk of business activities by responding to using data, information, intelligence, and knowledge.
Data, information, intelligence, and knowledge have a significant role to play when it comes to decision making within a business organization. Data, information, intelligence, and knowledge all belong to the same continuum; therefore, they work hand in hand to ensure an organization has achieved its objective by enabling the managemen6t of the organization to come up with better decisions concerning different activities within the organization. Data, information, intelligence, and knowledge are all different when it comes to their functions as well as their definition. However, they are all essential when it comes to accurate decision making within a business organization.
Businesses face many challenges, including disasters; therefore, coming up with a better decision on the challenges that affect a business enterprise will have a significant impact on their operation. When constricting a solution to the problem an organization is facing, it needs the organization to have a useful element that will help in guiding the strategy. When one of them is the mission, this can make one end up having incomplete information or data to make strategic decisions or lacking better knowledge and intelligence of coming up with better choice concerning a problem; hence this might end up affecting the organization’s bottom line.
Data
These are statistics and facts that are collected by the organization and used for analysis. Data are factual information that is used by an organization or individual for discussion, reasoning, or calculation. Organization values data because they are not opinion but raw materials that are used for analytic work. Data collected by an organization can be used to find a better solution and coming up with better decisions concerning challenges facing an organization. Data plays a significant role when it comes to business continuity management by helping an organization to come up with faster and better decisions that are well informed, backed up with facts. Thorough data analysis, organizations can have a better understanding of the challenges they are facing hence coming up with an informed decision on how to overcome the disaster.
Knowledge
Knowledge is awareness, familiarity, and having a better understanding of things like information and facts. In the modern and technology world, most organizations are now finding it relevant for an employee to have knowledge. Knowledge is now being considered to be the most competitive advantage to most organizations, and this is because there is no process in any organization that does not require one to have knowledge. Consequently, knowledge is relevant because all the operations or activities within the organization need knowledge. Valuable knowledge is used by the different organizations when they want to apply the business continuity management and use it to their employees who are experts and specialists to eliminate external threats. Experts and specialists who have valuable knowledge about different challenges can be used by an organization to come up with a better decision on how to handle or go about various issues affecting the organization. It wouldn’t be safe for the organization to carry on working in this field without these key staff (Brodej & Tucker, 2012).
Organizations use employees who are experts and specialists to solve challenges they might be facing. Ensuring employees have knowledge is towards the problem is the first step to solving the problem. For example, when employees have knowledge of a particular issue, this helps to increase their thinking process. When the thinking process improves, it allows experts to think in more transparent and wise ways hence solving problems the organization might be facing. Through having knowledge, employees can identify a problem before it happens, and this can save an organization big time. And in case a problem occurs, the experts will use the knowledge they have to solve the problem and ensure it does not happen again in the organization. Through having knowledge, an organization can understand themselves their weakness and their strength; all this can be used to solve the challenges that they might be facing. For example, when an organization knowledge, they can plan effectively on how to handle different disasters.
Intelligence
Intelligence involves the ability or a person or individual to process and understand information. Understanding information helps an organization deal with stressful situations like disasters. Intelligence consists of the ability to use skills and knowledge using information collected to solve problems. Intelligence plays an essential role in business continuity management by using critical thinking and emotional knowledge to come up with a better decision that will address issues affecting organizations.
Conclusion
In the current world, business continuity management is considered to be an area of management having its attention on spotting threats that might affect the operations of the organization. The business continuity management develops a framework that helps an organization to respond to a disaster by protecting the function of the organization. An organization should ensure they have better business continuity management that will help them recover and normalize their operation in case a disaster occurs.
Reference
Aleksandrova, S. V., Aleksandrov, M. N., & Vasiliev, V. A. (2018, September). Business Continuity Management System. In 2018 IEEE International Conference” Quality Management, Transport, and Information Security, Information Technologies”(IT&QM&IS) (pp. 14-17). IEEE.
Broder, J. F., & Tucker, E. (2012). Business Continuity Planning, Risk Analysis, and the Security Survey.
Blyth, M. (2019). Business continuity management: building an effective incident management plan. John Wiley & Sons.
Randeree, K., Mahal, A., & Narwani, A. (2012). A business continuity management maturity model for the UAE banking sector. Business Process Management Journal.
Rezaei Soufi, H., Torabi, S. A., & Sahebjamnia, N. (2019). Developing a novel quantitative framework for business continuity planning. International Journal of Production Research, 57(3), 779-800.
Segovia, F. (2017). Developing a Framework for Business Continuity Management within Local Government.