Structured workflows for Business Impact Analysis
Summarize
Summary of Structured workflows for Business Impact Analysis
Business Impact Analysis (BIA) helps ServiceNow customers predict and assess the consequences of disruptions to business processes or functions. It identifies and prioritizes critical processes, quantifies impacts, and determines dependencies on applications, technology, or vendors. Performing BIA annually is recommended to support the development of effective recovery strategies, minimizing revenue loss, legal issues, workforce disruption, and reputational damage.
Show less
Impact Ratings and Their Role
The Business Continuity Management (BCM) administrator configures impact ratings for various impact categories such as Revenue, Legal, and Reputation. These ratings determine whether an impact is tolerable or intolerable and guide the assessment process. Based on these configurations, BIA owners evaluate and provide disruption timelines for each impact category.
Multiple impact ratings can be set per category (Low, Moderate, High), each with a tolerability threshold. The recovery time objective (RTO) is derived from the disruption duration of the first non-tolerable impact rating, which drives recovery priorities.
RTO Calculation Examples
- Scenario 1: If Low impact is non-tolerable, the RTO is set above the Low impact disruption duration (e.g., 4 hours).
- Scenario 2: If Moderate impact is non-tolerable, the RTO is set above the Moderate impact disruption duration (e.g., 24 hours).
- Scenario 3: If High impact is non-tolerable, the RTO is set above the High impact disruption duration (e.g., 72 hours).
- Scenario 4: If all impact ratings are tolerable, the RTO defaults to the Maximum RTO value specified in the template (e.g., one month).
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Category Scoring
For impact categories contributing to the Recovery Point Objective, individual impact questions are evaluated based on the criticality of the data. The highest score among these questions forms the category score, which is stored in the Impact Category Results table for analysis.
Overall Impact Assessment and Recovery Tier
When disruption durations are updated for any impact category, the BIA’s RTO automatically recalculates as the lowest tolerable downtime across all categories. This recalculated RTO determines the organization’s Recovery Tier, which prioritizes recovery efforts. Typical tiers include:
- Immediate (Mission Critical)
- 1 Hour (Mission Critical)
- 4 Hours (Mission Critical)
- 8 Hours (Business Critical)
- 24 Hours (Business Critical)
- 72 Hours (Essential)
- 1 Week (Essential)
- 2 Weeks (Non-Essential)
- 1 Month (Non-Essential)
Business impact analysis helps you to predict the consequences of a disruption on a business process or business function.
A business process is a set of tasks done by a business organization to deliver a business service or product to customers. When a business process is disrupted, the impact to the organization can be huge in terms of revenue and reputation. Business impact analysis (BIA) is performed to identify and prioritize critical processes, quantify or qualify the impacts, and identify recovery dependencies. Ideally, business impact analysis on critical processes must be performed annually.
The assessment of a business critical process disruption helps you to estimate the consequential impact on your business revenue, legal issues, workforce disruption, or business reputation. It also enables you to identify the dependencies of your business process on business applications, technology, or vendors that might be affected. This analysis gathers the information needed to develop recovery strategies.
Impact ratings for your business impact analysis
The Business Continuity Management (BCM) administrator of your organization defines the impact ratings for your business impact analysis (BIA) and decides if the impact is tolerable for your business process. For more information on the impact ratings, see Configure an impact rating to assess an impact category. According to the configuration set up by BCM administrator, the questions are displayed in the RTO Impact Assessment tab.
Consider the example where BCM administrator has configured an intolerable impact rating for the Revenue impact category. BCM administrator has defined what qualifies to be an intolerable impact. As a BIA owner, you must identify the timeline at which the revenue impact may go beyond $1M.
Multiple impact ratings for an impact category
If your BCM administrator has configured the assessment questionnaire to include multiple impact ratings for an impact category, the impact category ratings are displayed in the Impact Category view as shown in the example.
- Low = 1
- Moderate = 2
- High = 3
| Scenario | Non-tolerable impact | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Scenario 1 | In the Impact Ratings table, the Tolerable field is set to false. |
If the administrator has specified that Low regulatory impact is non-tolerable, its corresponding disruption duration is set as the recovery time objective (RTO). In this example, the disruption duration for the 01 - Low impact rating is set to 4 hours. Therefore, the recovery time objective (RTO) for the impact category is above 4 hours. Even if the moderate impact disruption duration is shorter, the calculation will select the value from the first alphanumerically sorted impact rating that has the Tolerable field set to false. |
| Scenario 2 | In the Impact Ratings table, the Tolerable field is set to false. |
If the administrator has specified that Moderate regulatory impact is non-tolerable, its corresponding disruption duration is set as the recovery time objective (RTO). In this example, the disruption duration for 02 - Moderate impact is set to 24 hours. Therefore, the recovery time objective (RTO) for the impact category is above 24 hours. |
| Scenario 3 | In the Impact Ratings table, the Tolerable field is set to false. |
If the administrator has specified that High regulatory impact is non-tolerable, its corresponding disruption duration is set as the recovery time objective (RTO) as shown in the example. In the tabular example, the disruption duration for 03 - High impact is set to 72 hours. Therefore, the recovery time objective for the impact category is above 72 hours. |
| Scenario 4 | The Tolerable field for the Low, Moderate, and High impact ratings is set to true. |
If the administrator has set all the impact ratings as tolerable, the value specified in the Maximum RTO value field in the template is selected as the recovery time objective (RTO). In the example, the administrator has set all the impact ratings as tolerable. Therefore, the recovery time objective (RTO) is one month as per the value specified in the Maximum RTO
value field. |
- Calculation of category score from impact analysis questions for an impact category that contributes to Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
If the impact category contributes to RPO, then evaluate each impact analysis question in that RPO category based on the value of your data like business critical, operation critical, business essential, or operation essential. The maximum value among all the questions of that RPO is considered as the Category Score of that Impact Category and stored in the Impact Category Results table [sn_bia_category_result].
- Calculation of overall impact assessment result for a BIA
When you update the Disruption Duration of an impact category, the RTO of the BIA is automatically updated. The RTO of the BIA is set as the lowest tolerable downtime from each impact category.
For example, consider a BIA having four impact categories – Legal, Reputation, Workforce, and Regulatory. When you update the disruption duration value of the legal impact category, then the RTO value of the BIA is recalculated based on the lowest tolerable disruption duration from each impact category. The Recovery Tier varies from organization to organization and is set based on the recalculated RTO value.
RTO value Recovery Tier Immediate Mission Critical 1 Hour Mission Critical 4 Hours Mission Critical 8 Hours Business Critical 24 Hours Business Critical 72 Hours Essential 1 Week Essential 2 Weeks Non-Essential 1 Month Non-Essential