Tessa Michaels, Administration–Business and Technology Solutions
Business continuity planning at the University of California, Berkeley got a boost with the latest release of the Berkeley Continuity Planning Tool (BCPT) in June 2007, and two recent awards. BCPT, renamed from its predecessor Restarting Berkeley to focus on readiness and continuity, includes numerous enhancements based on user feedback. BCPT efficiently produces an action-oriented plan that increases a department's ability to withstand the impact of a disaster, while significantly reducing the time and effort needed for recovery.
UC Berkeley won two awards this summer for Restarting Berkeley — the UC systemwide Larry L. Sautter 2007 Golden Award, for innovative use of IT for academic or administrative processes; and the NACUBO 2007 Innovation Award from the National Association of College and University Business Officers. The awards are evidence that the work is of value for UC Berkeley, the UC system, and the higher education community.
In 2001, UC Berkeley developed a campus Business Resumption Plan to prepare for a rapid resumption of Berkeley's teaching, research, and public service mission following any unexpected interruption. This plan recognized that because the core activities of teaching, research, and service are performed essentially at the unit and department level, preparations to continue these activities after a disaster must take place at that level as well as at the campus administration level.
The Office of Business Resumption (OBR) subsequently created a planning methodology based on a document template. However, it became clear that to enable our 300-400 departments to plan in a decentralized and somewhat independent fashion, a self-service online planning tool was essential.
Funding for the project was obtained through an academic/administrative collaboration between UC Berkeley's Disaster-Resistant University Program and the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, enabling Paul Dimond, manager of the Office of Business Resumption, Sarah Nathe, manager of the Disaster-Resistant University Program, and Tessa Michaels, Administration's chief technology officer, to transform the document template into a web-based tool. The application was built working with web developers Karin Bliman, Kai Hsieh, Adam Cohen, Shifra Gaman, and their team in IST's Application Services department; and project delivery and technical analysts Sharon Miller and Kenichi Tanaka from Business and Technology Solutions in Administration. Restarting Berkeley, the first incarnation of the tool, was launched in September 2006.
BCPT is tailored specifically to higher education and guides the user, question-by-question, through the planning process. It provides on-screen coaching in the form of a context-sensitive guidance box, printed output for use in team meetings, and a printable business continuity plan upon completion. Users consistently praise the tool for its intuitive interface and ease-of-use.
The plan is organized into two key parts:
A central tenet of Berkeley's planning philosophy is that an important outcome of the planning process is the list of action items, which becomes the department's "to-do list" for disaster readiness and loss reduction.
Another tenet of Berkeley's philosophy is that the periodic disaster recovery exercise is invaluable in improving any plan. Using BCPT, a department's key leaders, faculty, and staff can review their continuity plan, pose simple scenarios to challenge the effectiveness of the plan, and conduct an exercise to test it. This would generate a revised list of action items and improvements that would be incorporated into their plan via BCPT.
BCPT is accessed via the Blu business portal. A "demonstration version" of the BCPT application can be viewed at http://bcptdemo.berkeley.edu/.
Higher-education institutions that wish to install and modify the application for use on their own campuses may download the complete site (with documentation) at http://obr.berkeley.edu/download.html. This service is provided at no charge, in alignment with our commitment to collaboration and public service. More than 80 institutions already have taken advantage of this resource.
For assistance with developing a business continuity plan for your unit or department, or for more information, contact Paul Dimond,
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