Business Continuity Management in Public Sector Organizations - From Component, to System, to Society

While Business Continuity Management (BCM) shares some of its overall purpose with risk management, it has generally received less attention in scholarly research. BCM originates from the private sector as an approach used to strengthen an organization's capability to maintain critical functions in the face of disruptions and facilitate recovery but has gained more attention also among public sector organizations. This paper presents findings from an interview study aiming to explore the approaches used to adopt BCM in different types of Swedish public sector organizations and the challenges entailed. Specifically, the study sheds light on factors affecting how BCM-related information is shared between sub-units of public sector organizations and how the units' individual BCM practices are aggregated from sub-unit level to the level of the organization as a whole to provide an overall risk picture, influencing the possibilities of maintaining critical societal functions. In this way, the paper explores how BCM operates at multiple levels-from the individual components within an organization, to the overall system, and ultimately its impact on society: from component, to system, to society. The results confirm that BCM is an approach that only recently has gained increased attention and use among Swedish public sector organizations, complementing the use of Risk and Vulnerability Assessments. Several respondents highlight the need to institutionalize BCM within their organizations to obtain increased effectiveness. The approaches to adopt BCM appears to be influenced more by the size of the organization than by the type of public sector organization. Challenges related to aggregating BCM-related information are primarily framed as a governance issue rather than a technical concern about data consistency. Finally, the findings show that respondents describe their current approaches to aggregation as unstructured, which suggests a need for further research aiming at exploring and testing ways to enhance BCM practices.

Keywords: Business continuity management, BCM, BCP, Public sector, Crisis preparedness, Aggregation, Integration.