Couple of years back, I was sitting in a large meeting room in Gurgaon office that was designed to hold board meetings with a mahogany wooden round table and comfortable ergonomically leather chairs.
It’s been tough few weeks creating and evaluating the business continuity plan (BCP) across various offices & locations for all small to big processes. After all it’s a part of the fortune 500 companies that survived for 150+ years and had seen the worst days from hurricane sandy to SARS.
We just looked at all possible scenarios that could go wrong from government shutdown to fire or terrorism! Now, we are sitting with the chief risk and compliance officer, who joined us from the New York office to design and evaluate the plan before presenting it to the board members. ‘Alright, I think we are covered from all aspects’ said the CCO, he was looking satisfied.
There was still something that was going on at the back of my mind, there is some problem, some pattern that we all are missing. After the meeting, I was driving back to home but then I realize, what the pattern I saw!
“All the offices, including the BCP locations are in the same seismic zone”. It’s like you are setting up main operations and backup on top of the ‘pacific ring of fire’. No one including me, cross-referenced the plan with other datasets. That means if an earthquake of 5.5 magnitude hits all our sites would be down. It was from relating the map I learned during the geography classes.
Next, few months, I tried cross-referencing our offices with other datasets like political rivalries, to possible nuclear threats, supply chain disruptions and it open a can of worms. However, everyone was just happy and feeling safe thinking that ‘the show will go on’.
Over the years business continuity plan has become just a mundane list of paperwork to tell the shareholders that ‘All is well’… ‘All is well’.. So, there are sides when companies have a backup offices in Pakistan for the main office is the cost of Gujrat and Delhi! If a single nuclear bomb was used by either of these two very friendly counties, both primary and backup offices will be in the air, even if I ignore the fact that they are in same seismic zone.
Then came the corona virus outbreak. Corporate profits and earnings estimates trimmed down by most of the S&P 500 or Dow Industrial companies… We realized most of the supply for medicines, healthcare equipment, and raw materials comes from the same place, where the outbreak started! This means no N 95 masks, no paracetamol, no antibiotics for either the patients nor the healthcare professional. What an amazing BCP plan! So, what’s wrong? Did anyone ever thought of this risk? It could have been a terror strike or meteor shower if not virus outbreak.
Every day, I see beautiful graphs and data visualizations by novice data scientists on professional and social media but in actual they mean nothing. It’s not only Amazon, Google or Facebook has data, every small, medium, and big companies have data too but what differentiate Google, Amazon, Facebook from the rest, is cross-referencing the datasets to unlock the potential.
Here is what Corona outbreak tells us:
- Never put all your eggs in one basket – I don’t think this is new but the interpretation of it may sound new. We just got to know that sometime the basket looks so big, that we think that it’s a different basket
- Charity begins at home – If you have so much data, use it to measure how safe your business is before selling the data itself or keep saying ‘data is the new gold’. It is the new gold but only if you know what to do with the gold
- Cross-reference the data – The concept of alternate data is not new, try to reference it with other data like supply chain with weather conditions, pollution, and seismic zone.. Remember the power of referencing from the movie Déjà vu
- Just don’t do things because everyone is doing it – I always wondered why almost all major companies have their BCP office in Philippines the country that gets a hurricane every year. No offence but think deep.
- Cost of production is not the only thing that a business should only look at – Why do you have everything flows from one country to the rest of the world? If you are here to stay, think for future
Every tragedy teaches us lessons but ironically, what we learn from history is nobody learns from history!
Abhijit Ghosh is the CEO of StanShare, in addition to an enthusiastic learner with deep understanding of both data, technology, and concurrent people management policies and practices. An exceptional achiever, well-rounded, multilingual, culturally aware professional with a strong background in building and leading multi-discipline, geographically dispersed teams to manage complex operations and automation. Specializes in highly cross functional collaborations with Operations, Finance, HR, Data Management in financial services industry. He has over 17 years of hands-on management experience in planning, creating, data products and solutions through design thinking. Extremely skilled strategist for robotics and cognitive automation solutions.
StanShare 