IBM offers business continuity solution

IBM’s India Research Laboratory has developed the Resiliency Maturity Index (RMI), a solution which quantitatively assesses the ability of an organization to recover from different disasters such as floods, power outages, software glitches, epidemics, and terrorist attacks. The software tool, which IBM has used to assess the ability of its own global services delivery operations in India and Brazil to withstand disasters, also assists in pointing out to organizations where they can best spend more money to improve their ability to cope with disasters, Guruduth Banavar, associate director at the Bangalore center of IBM India Research Laboratory, said last week.

IBM’s services business will offer to its customers services around the RMI framework which will help them assess and plan their resiliency to disasters, Banavar said. The framework developed by IBM is generic so that it can be used across a variety of organizations in a variety of industries with little customization. Besides a score that indicates the organization’s overall resiliency to disaster, the model breaks the score down at different levels of the organization, from an individual score for each business unit, to a score for each component or sub-component in a business unit. Components could include the network, e-mail system, or even the transportation system. The company says that the RMI framework is especially useful in bringing out the interactions between these components and their influence on the organization’s overall resiliency.

IBM says that the RMI will be useful for companies outsourcing work, as they can now use the RMI to assess the resiliency of the service providers they outsource to, Banavar said. Companies outsourcing work typically worry about the ability of their suppliers to withstand and recover from threats or disaster. Service providers can in turn use the RMI tool to assess and improve their ability to cope with disasters.

IBM is working with the Information Technology Services Qualification Center (ITsqc) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to incorporate parts of the RMI assessment framework into an industry standard. The eSCM-SP (eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers) model, developed jointly by ITsqc and industry, is a best-practices model which is used to evaluate IT service providers along a number of dimensions, including their ability to withstand various threats or disaster. IBM’s RMI team has been working with Carnegie Mellon to understand how the RMI or parts of it can be useful within eSCM-SP.

There is also a human resources dimension to business continuity, so we note that IBM researchers have also developed a Skills Planning model for optimal allocation of skills and job roles across an organization, especially those with multiple sites, to minimize the impact of a disaster at any one site. This model takes into account different operational aspects, including critical workloads, skill levels, mobile workers, multi-skilled workers, cross-training, operations in shifts, wage costs, and multi-location communication or management overheads, IBM said.