Business Continuity: The Automation Survival Guide Part 5

[john.mackey]

As you’ve gathered from the blogs in our series, business continuity is a large topic with lots of potential scenarios to cover. It is, of course, not just about automation, but automated processes need to be considered in business continuity planning as they’re another way to perform work.

We’ve talked about the constructs of a business continuity plan, best practices for what to include in your plan, and things to remember when enacting your plan.

Let’s boil all of this down to four key points to remember:

1. Automated Processed Are Both People and Technology

Automation sits between people and technology. This isn’t a revelation; we talk about digital work in everything we do.

So, when it comes to digital workers and business continuity, you should have the same considerations you have for your technology. Since digital workers run on virtual machines, we must understand the applications that need to be available and how to handle disaster recovery.

And because digital workers also perform the work, you need to ensure the business continuity chapter for automation also covers systems access and data access.

2. Manual or Automated: Work Is Work

We also need to consider the workload. Whether it’s people or digital workers doing the work — it’s all work for the organization.

That’s why you can think of the work as a global set of tasks that need to be completed, regardless of how it’s usually fulfilled. Put the what above the how.

An automated process can be fulfilled by a colleague if needed.

However, in some organizations, the use of advanced features and functionality like API integrations may mean the design of the automated solution differs significantly from the original manual process.

Our Tip

Watch out for differences between manual and automated processes, and make sure there’s a way to complete the process without the API or ensure the disaster recovery solution enables quick recovery to meet your recovery time objective (RTO).

3. The Business Continuity Mindset

As with many things in life, success often depends on having the right mindset.

Don’t forget this: disruption is temporary. It’s not meant to be a new way of working. It’s only meant to get us through with an acceptable option, not the optimal one.

Planning for these disruptive events (the unpredicted predictable) is how you’ll ensure you can react quickly and effectively to minimize pain while critical business activities continue. It’s just to keep the lights on.

Of course, if you need to invoke your business continuity plan frequently, it means something’s not quite right in your estate, and the focus should be on addressing the root cause. Regular disruptions are not normal.

Ultimately, though, none of this should ever be a barrier to realizing automation’s benefits, such as efficiency savings. With proper planning, you can guarantee plenty of time before recovery is needed, so there’s no need for a full army of people on standby.

4. The Role of Automation in Ensuring Business Continuity

Throughout this series, we discussed business continuity in the context of something going wrong with automation.

But business continuity is not just about handling disruptions to automated processes.

Automation also plays a role in maintaining operations during difficult times, such as natural disasters or accidents. It helped many companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, processing new requirements from governments when banks didn’t have enough people to handle the workload.

With that in mind, what else can automation do to help you maintain your operations and keep the lights on?