IRMI Update—Issue #151
An E-mail Newsletter for Risk and Insurance Professionals
ISSN: 1530-7948
December 29, 2006
In This Issue
Colleague,
A recent survey commissioned by the National Emergency Response & Rescue
Training Center (NERRTC), a division of The Texas A&M University System's Texas
Engineering Extension Service, provides some good news and some bad news. The
good news: 5 years after September 11, and 1 year after Hurricane Katrina, most
companies have some form of disaster response plan in place and have updated
it in the past year. The bad news: 1 out of 4 professionals responsible for
corporate disaster preparedness efforts report that they have never conducted
a disaster response exercise or their employees are not trained on their plans.
This is rather like a football coach drawing up an imaginative razzle-dazzle
play for his offense, but not showing it to them until they are 14 points down
at halftime. Without time to learn and practice it, they won't be able to execute
it. The game is lost.
Why would senior executives expect middle managers and employees to effectively
execute a business continuity plan at the time of a crisis with no training
or practice? Because training and practice are costly. Executives are comforted
knowing the plan is on the bookshelf, but it is a false sense of security. This
is part of the, "It won't happen to us syndrome" that makes risk management
so challenging.
To combat this problem, risk professionals must find minimally disruptive
ways to train, test, and practice their plans. One common approach is to conduct
tabletop exercises with managers to simulate what might happen in an actual
crisis, but even these take people away from their work.
What has been your experience with respect to training and testing disaster
plans? Have you ever seen an organization try to use an untested plan in a crisis?
How did it go? How do you get executive buy-in for training and testing? Have
you found innovative ways to conduct training exercises that you can share with
our readers? [See reader responses.]
Have a great day and a healthy, happy, and safe new year.
Jack
Jack P. Gibson, CPCU, CRIS, ARM
President
IRMI
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