Business Continuity Work Group Initiatives and Accomplishments

The Work Group's primary focus is on the "how to" of business continuity planning. The objective of the Business Continuity Work Group is to work in collaboration with state and local agencies and representatives of the IT Corporate Roundtable to develop education and training opportunities and tools that address business continuance and IT disaster recovery planning needs of New York's state and local government entities.

2009-2010 Accomplishments

Presentations and Training

  • Hosted a three-day workshop "Essentials of Business Continuity Management training" in partnership with ICOR and the NYS Forum
  • Provided various presentations on the "how to" of BC planning including:
    • How to conduct an Exercise
    • Performing H1N1 Pandemic Planning
    • Defining Collocation MOUs associated with Disaster Recovery space
    • Understanding SEMO/NY-Alert (briefing by Kevin Ross)
    • Review of a Federal HSEEP Exercise Methodology
    • Panel discussion on virtualization for Information Technology Disaster Recovery

Information Sharing

  • Committee meetings continue be a valuable opportunity for practitioners to share and discuss common challenges and potential solutions.
  • Provide information on the SEMO planning tools for resilience and core COOP competencies involving NY, NJ, CT and PA, NYC and several downstate counties.
  • Communication of SEMO revision of DHS/FEMA COOP courses that will be NYS-specific including pilot delivery rollout

Forging New Alliances

  • Mark Spreitzer co-presented with Deb Snyder at the Project Management Community of Practice regarding Business Continuity and Security in the system development lifecycle (SDLC)
  • The B/C working group acquired two new State co-chairs, Dave DeMatteo with SEMO and Ken Mason with NYSED. The partnership will help collectively pursue a common goal of improving emergency preparedness in NYS agencies.

Other

  • Work group provided participation in the Web 2.0 joint task work groups and provided two way feedback from meetings

2010-2011 Projected Initiatives

Education/Training Seminars

  • Provide ICS and NIMS training. SEMO will provide state-specific COOP courses to B/C working group members. SEMO will also provide more background information on ICS and some basics on implementing ICS in a COOP environment.
  • Host a ½ day workshop on testing, training, and exercising COOP/DR plans
  • Continuation of NY Alert - demo of actual use of the program, map of what to use it for, application of what is can/should be use for within an agency outside of emergency notification
  • With the NYS Archives, a session on records retention and disposal and smart records retention (7)
  • Sessions on Incident Command System (ICS)/National Incident Management Systems (NIMS) and testing/exercising COOP (2)

Leadership

  • Investigate and map critical IT systems interagency dependencies (13)

Tool Development

  • SEMO is working on an all-hazards risk assessment tool that includes crosswalk elements for conducting a business impact analysis (BIA). B/C working group members will have input and visibility into the process, as appropriate.
  • Provide guidance on SEMO templates and job aids. - SEMO is revising all of its COOP guidance documents, templates and job aids. The documents will reflect recently promulgated Presidential Directives, and will be available for all agencies to use as a guide in their COOP efforts.

Presentations

  • Use of social media to manage communication and image during a crisis (Do with Social Media joint task group).
  • Deliver an independent auditors panel presenting audit requirement and operational needs
  • NY-Alert follow up and demo (how to use it, including outside of emergency notification), deliver post 3.0 rollout
  • A "How To" session related to NY ALERT

Conference

  • Deliver a BCP session with the Small/Medium/Local Government Work Group
  • Gartner/industry analyst vendor presentation - Contingency planning trends and best practices discussion open to all work groups
  • Plan for a day-long conference for State agency personnel on emergency planning and business continuity