Structured workflows for Business Impact Analysis
Summarize
Summary of Structured workflows for Business Impact Analysis
Business Impact Analysis (BIA) helps ServiceNow customers predict the consequences of disruptions to business processes, which are key to delivering services or products. BIA identifies and prioritizes critical processes, assesses impacts on revenue, legal, workforce, and reputation, and uncovers dependencies on applications, technology, and vendors. Performing BIA annually ensures updated recovery strategies and readiness for business continuity.
Show less
Impact Ratings and Assessment
The Business Continuity Management (BCM) administrator configures impact ratings to evaluate the tolerability of disruptions across impact categories. These ratings—Low, Moderate, High—are used in the RTO Impact Assessment tab. Customers acting as BIA owners must identify disruption timelines for critical metrics, such as when revenue impact exceeds a defined threshold.
Multiple impact ratings per category allow nuanced assessment. The BCM administrator sets which impact levels are tolerable or intolerable, and the disruption duration tied to the first intolerable rating determines the Recovery Time Objective (RTO). For example:
- If Low impact is intolerable, the RTO is based on its disruption duration (e.g., 4 hours).
- If Moderate impact is intolerable, the RTO aligns with its disruption duration (e.g., 24 hours).
- If High impact is intolerable, the RTO reflects its disruption duration (e.g., 72 hours).
- If all impact levels are tolerable, the RTO defaults to the Maximum RTO value set in the template (e.g., one month).
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Category Scoring
When an impact category affects the RPO, each impact question is evaluated based on data criticality (business critical, operation critical, etc.). The highest value among these questions becomes the category score, stored in the Impact Category Results table. This quantifies data recovery priorities.
Overall Impact Assessment and RTO Calculation
Updating the disruption duration in any impact category triggers an automatic update of the BIA’s overall RTO. The BIA’s RTO is the shortest tolerable disruption duration across all impact categories, ensuring focus on the most stringent recovery needs. Based on the recalculated RTO, the Recovery Tier is assigned, guiding prioritization:
- Immediate (Mission Critical): RTO of minutes
- 1 to 8 Hours (Mission Critical)
- 24 to 72 Hours (Business Critical)
- 1 to 2 Weeks (Essential)
- 1 Month (Non-Essential)
This structured approach allows ServiceNow customers to clearly define, assess, and prioritize recovery objectives, enabling effective business continuity planning aligned with organizational impact tolerances.
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