The floods have now reseeded and the true cost of the damage is now becoming clear. Insurance assessors have spent time assessing the needs of their clients and the damage caused, and now the clean up operation is well underway.
However, many businesses are still not operating and some of the roads are still unsafe or impassable. With Christmas being the busiest time of year for most of retail businesses, the Cumbrian community have suffering.
Any disaster occurring can be damaging to a business, however, seasonal impacts are damaging to businesses. For example a town centre retail shop will be looking to make good profits at Christmas time, whereas a tourist based business will be looking to capitalise on the UK summer months.
Disasters come in all shapes and sizes. Most people visualise a disaster as a flood or an explosion, but a disaster could be more loacalised, such as a major server failure or an engineer drilling through a major telecoms cable. A disaster should be looked on as “Anything that detrimentally affects your business”. Working on that basis you should look at all potential failures and risk assess your needs.
Some people in Cumbria were not directly affected by the floods but have suffered because of the damage to the road and bridge network. This could be that staff can’t get to work or suppliers have to charge more because of the diversions.
A good business leader will have options and will always have a plan. It is essential that the plan is well practiced and that its not just locked in a cabinet collecting dust. It should also be adapted as the business needs adapt and as the environment adapts. A classic example was major credit card company in the UK came to practice a 2 year old disaster recovery plan, plan only to realise that the staff were not trained on the old software. They made the assumption that they could roll back to a previous computer setup in the event of an emergency, however as they have a high turnover of staff they soon realised that their staff were not trained to use the old software.
They, however, put together a 1 hour training package and took the risk that there would be basic mistakes. This was a good example of an adapting business manager. However, they have now changed their disaster recovery plan to incorporate regular software updates and a strategy to practice the plan once every 12 months.
