Leader: Bird flu threat highlights disaster-planning flaws

The threat of a worldwide flu pandemic - whether you believe it is being over-hyped or not - on the back of the H5N1 strain of avian flu, highlights some serious problems with business continuity planning today: the human angle.

If bird flu does mutate into a strain of the virus which is able to easily spread from human to human then the experts tell us the world faces a pandemic that will totally eclipse the 1918 flu outbreak which killed millions of people.

It is vital that business continuity becomes more than a box-ticking exercise for the auditors and instead involves all parts of the organisation, starting at the very top.

In the list of threats to the global economies and markets at the World Economic Forum in Davos, flu came second only to rising oil prices and ahead of terrorism, and it was one of the biggest worries on delegates' minds at the Business Continuity Expo in London this week.

The worry was not so much an IT issue - although things such as remote working feature heavily in the contingency plans of the big banks - but a people one.

The latest worst-case scenario UN predictions for an avian flu pandemic are that it could kill up to 150 million people. That's not only a huge human cost but it would obviously have a massive impact on businesses' ability to operate and on the stability of the world's financial markets and systems.

A delegate from Lloyds TSB said his bank is currently working on an assumption of a 55 per cent staff absentee rate during a flu pandemic, while another is looking at 90 per cent - based on 30 per cent being sick, 30 per cent off looking after someone sick and the other 30 per cent too scared to come into work.

Which means it's all very well keeping the IT systems up and running but that's not much use if there's no one using them.

Such is the potential threat to the financial markets that the Financial Services Authority has set up an avian flu committee to help co-ordinate the UK banking industry's preparation for a possible outbreak, while the government's civil contingencies group responsible for the financial services sector is now also advising firms to draw up a list of alumni who could cover for critical positions in the organisation during a flu outbreak.

Sound advice, obviously, but the problem is that business continuity is all too often still an afterthought tacked onto the IT director's list of responsibilities.

One head of IT speaking at the conference told the story of how at the board meeting when it was decided that his organisation needed a business continuity plan, and that someone would need to take responsibility for it, everyone looked at their shoes and simply pointed to the IT guy.

That is a potentially disastrous route to follow, as the bird flu threat so worryingly highlights. It is vital that business continuity becomes more than a box-ticking exercise for the auditors and instead involves all parts of the organisation, starting at the very top.

If it isn't then you're likely to end up with the lights on but no one at home.