---
sourceDocument: Australia Governance, Risk, and Compliance
sourceDocumentLink: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/australia/governance-risk-compliance

 Release :

    - australia

ft:locale :

    - en-US

ft:publication_title :

    - Australia Governance, Risk, and Compliance

ft:clusterId :

    - grc

bundleId :

    - grc

workflow :

    - Technology


---

# Email notifications in Business Continuity Management

# Email notifications in Business Continuity Management {#ariaid-title1}

Release version: Australia  
Updated July 24, 2026  
![](https://www.servicenow.com/docs/portal-asset/ico-clock) 2 minutes to read
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## Summary of Email notifications in Business Continuity Management

The Business Continuity Management (BCM) application in ServiceNow sends email notifications at various stages of the Business Impact Analysis (BIA), planning, exercise, and crisis management lifecycle.
These notifications keep stakeholders informed about important updates and events, helping ensure timely communication and response throughout BCM processes.
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Administrators can customize these notifications to modify when they are sent, who receives them, and their content to align with organizational needs.

## Key Features

* **Event-based notifications:** Automatically triggered by specific system events such as updates to BIA records or plan dependencies. Notifications are sent to relevant plan owners, managers, admins, and reviewers based on roles and configured conditions.
* **Workflow-driven notifications:** Sent in response to record state changes or conditions defined in Flow Designer without requiring event registration. Examples include alert updates for watchers and failure notifications to task owners when recovery event tasks fail.
* **Ad-hoc notifications:** Manually initiated by users, such as sending crisis alert notifications to stakeholders via the Crisis Map. Recipients are dynamically determined at send time based on user selection or impacted resource contacts.

## Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers

By leveraging BCM email notifications, customers can:

* Ensure relevant stakeholders receive timely updates on BIA changes, plan dependencies, and crisis alerts to maintain situational awareness and facilitate rapid response.
* Customize notification recipients and content to fit organizational roles and communication protocols, enhancing clarity and reducing notification fatigue.
* Use automated workflows and manual triggers to maintain control over communication during critical BCM lifecycle events.

Understanding the notification types, their triggers, and recipient roles allows BCM users to optimize communication flows, ensuring that the right people are informed at the right time, which is crucial for effective business continuity and crisis management.  
Email notifications are sent by the Business Continuity Management (BCM) application at different points in the Business Impact Analysis, planning, exercise, and crisis management lifecycle.

## Email notifications {#email-notifications-in-bcm__section_email_notifications_bcm}

An admin can modify email notifications to change when to send it, who receives it, and what it contains. For more information, see [Create an email notification](https://www.servicenow.com/docs/access?context=t_CreateANotification&version=australia&pubname=australia-platform-administration&ft:locale=en-US).

The following tables describe the notifications, recipients, roles, and the associated conditions provisioned in the BCM application.

Event-based notifications
:   Trigger automatically off a registered system event when qualifying data changes.{#email-notifications-in-bcm__table_event_based_notifications_bcm__entry__3}

    | Purpose | Triggering conditions | Recipient and roles |
    |-|-|-|
    | Notify BIA Updated |||
    | Notifies plan stakeholders of BIA changes. | A Business Impact Analysis record is updated. The system finds every plan that uses that BIA as a primary-scope asset and triggers once per matching plan. | Recipient: plan_owner (sn_bcp_plan) Roles: sn_bcp.plan_manager (can set or change plan_owner), sn_bcp.plan_admin (can also write plan_owner while the plan is in Draft, Review, or Returned state) |
    | BIA Dependency Update Notification |||
    | Notifies reviewers of BIA dependency changes. | Triggers from the same BIA-update chain, routed through the shared DependencyUpdateContextBase helper. Condition: The matching sn_bia_dependency_update_config record has Send notification enabled. | Recipient: User or group fields listed in the User fields property of the matching sn_bia_dependency_update_config record, resolved per snapshot. Roles depend on which field the config points to. Plan owner: sn_bcp.plan_manager, sn_bcp.plan_admin. sn_bia_analysis.bcm_lead: sn_bia.bia_manager or sn_bia.bia_planner (BIA in Draft), sn_bia.bia_admin (BIA in Draft or Review). |
    | BCP Dependency Update Notification |||
    | Notifies reviewers of plan dependency changes. | Same mechanism as the BIA Dependency Update Notification. Condition: The matching sn_bcp_dependency_update_config record has Send notification enabled, triggered on the plan rather than the BIA. | Recipient: User or group fields listed in the matching sn_bcp_dependency_update_config record's User fields property, resolved like the BIA Dependency Update Notification. Roles depend on which field the config points to. sn_bcp_plan.plan_owner: sn_bcp.plan_manager, sn_bcp.plan_admin. sn_bcp_plan.bcm_lead: sn_bcp.plan_contributor or sn_bcp.plan_manager (plan in Draft), sn_bcp.plan_admin (plan in Draft or Review). |
    [ ]

    {#email-notifications-in-bcm__table_event_based_notifications_bcm}

Workflow-driven notifications
:   Trigger directly from a record update condition or a Flow Designer state change, with no separate event registration involved.
:
    {#email-notifications-in-bcm__table_workflow_driven_notifications_bcm__entry__3}

    | Notification | Purpose and triggering conditions | Recipient and roles |
    |-|-|-|
    | Notification for subscribed alert | Notifies people watching a crisis or threat alert that it changed. Triggered when an alert record is updated while it has one or more people on its watch list. | Recipient: watch_list (sn_fam_alert) Roles: None. watch_list carries no field-level ACL; any user with access to the alert record can add themselves or others as a watcher. |
    | Send action email when an event task fails | Informs the task owner that their recovery event task failed. Triggered when an Event Task's state field changes to value 9 while it has an assigned owner. Flow Designer trigger condition: `state CHANGES TO assigned_to IS NOT EMPTY` on sn_recovery_event_task. | Recipient: assigned_to (sn_recovery_event_task) Roles: sn_recovery.event_user (write access while the task is open or pending), sn_recovery.event_manager (write access whenever the user can edit the parent record) |
    [ ]

    {#email-notifications-in-bcm__table_workflow_driven_notifications_bcm}

Ad-hoc notifications
:   Started manually by a user, not triggered automatically by any record condition.
:
    {#email-notifications-in-bcm__table_adhoc_notifications_bcm__entry__4}

    | Notification | Purpose | Triggering conditions | Recipient and roles |
    |-|-|-|-|
    | BCM Crisis Map Notification ("Notify Stakeholders") | Sends an alert notification to stakeholders during a crisis. | A user manually runs the Notify Stakeholders action on a Crisis Map alert (sn_fam_alert). There is no automatic condition on this action. | Recipient: Not a stored field. Recipients are computed at send time: either the specific users the sender picks, or contacts pulled from whichever resource records are marked as impacted. Roles: None. There is no role restriction on who can trigger the action; recipients are computed dynamically rather than role-gated. |
    [ ]

    {#email-notifications-in-bcm__table_adhoc_notifications_bcm}