DEMO Business Processes Design to Improve the Enterprise Business Continuity Plans

Organizations are concerned in building resilience to mitigate the challenges that result from unpredictable and constant threat scenarios. Therefore, designing, implementing and operating solutions to increase the resilience is nowadays a key concern that must be addressed properly. The most usual resilience mechanism to deal with the unpredictable within the business ecosystem and correspondingly IT is to produce business continuity (BC) plans. On the one hand, a BC plan is usually established with the data collected from the operation and from the as-is holistic design of business processes (BP). However, BC plans are usually challenged by the insufficient, fragmented, inconsistent and incomplete information when capturing the enterprise’ BP. On the other hand, the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) must be properly prepared to support all business activities and build good recovery strategies, demanding precise, concise, complete, coherent and consistent enterprise’ business processes. This paper integrates and evaluates the DEMO holistic design of business processes with BIA. This solution contributes to the identification and enrichment of existing weaknesses in BC plans and thus improve resilience in case of threat. The validation of the solution is performed using an insurance company case study.