Friday, November 18, 2011

ERM-BC-COOP

These are "professionals"?

A rant

 

I'm thinking about cutting down the number of LinkedIn groups and other lists and forums I follow. Maybe a few blogs, too.

Several of the lists/groups/forums that I am considering leaving have "Professional" in the title.

Professional in name only

    That led me to believe any discussions would be at a professional level.

    Yet many, far too many, discussions are at the tyro level.

    By itself that's not bad - tyros need help, too, and they can - and I'm thinking of one in particular - and do raise important questions; queries that get us all thinking.

    One of the things that irritates, that - as we say in Dixie, "sticks in my craw" - is the titles many of these blatant-by-their-post amateurs advertise.

    Senior this and Master that.

    Another irritant is the level of the questions.

    Good grief; do your homework before asking someone else to do it for you.

    DRJ (http://www.drj.com) has a Website fill of good information.

    DRII (http://www.drii.org) likewise has megabytes of useful information.

    The information is free.

    Of course the curious person needs to invest a little time to locate and extract the nuggets.

    Why bother? It's easier to ask an actual practitioner "How do you spell "BIA?"

    Because there are so many tyros-with-professional-titles claiming to be business continuity practitioners, people who engage them due to a title or employment by a Big Name Consulting Firm, expect a professional product. They deserve a professional; product.

    But they don't get a professional product.

    If the plan doesn't work? The independent likely lacks performance insurance, and the Big Name Consulting Company will try to tie the client up in a finger-pointing court date. In any case, it is hard to prove that the client ignored the practitioner's recommendations or failed to exercise the plan.

    But all business continuity practitioners take the hit.

When "BC" really is "DR"

    As long as I am IN "curmudgeon" mode I may as well express my opinion of groups that have "business continuity" in the title but in truth are misnamed "disaster recovery" groups.

    There is nothing wrong with a disaster recovery group, but please, call it what it is: disaster recovery or even "resilience" which one Big Name Company has high jacked for its disaster recovery services.

Link, don't think

    One or two of the groups I am about to drop consist of 90% links to magazine articles.

    The article may be really worthwhile, but I sometimes suspect the linker never read past the headline.

    I really would like a synopsis of the article before I waste my time following the link.

    I'm sure some of the articles are worth reading, but I don't have the time to follow each and every link on the chance that the linked copy is relevant to what I do.

Longer articles at https://sites.google.com/site/johnglennmbci/

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