What’s the future career path for today’s BCM professional? I’ve plodded along a BCM career path for 14 years, and I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. All I see is more tunnel. Here’s a simplified job description for a BCM Manager in a multinational company in Asia, and maybe where you live, too:
Did I miss anything? I’m not making a judgment about the value of BCM or BCM professionals. I am one. I’m making a judgment about the long-term prospects in our profession for the vast majority of practitioners today. I know several regional, national or international BCM directors who get to travel, manage the work of others, make presentations at industry conferences, give interviews to reporters. But I hope they’ll be happy doing the same thing in 2020, because I just can’t see many of them moving up the corporate org chart. There may be exceptions, but I think they only prove the rule.
You have to love a risk management standard called “fifty-fifty”. All three (3) parts of Australia & New Zealand’s proposed AS/NZ 5050 standard for risk management and BCM are available for free: Part 1 is the Specification (what to do, “shall” do this, “may” do that); Part 2 is the Practice (how to do, why you “should”); Part 3 is called Assurance (controls & verification, and the first audit guidance for a BCM standard). The comment period ended last year; keep New Zealand or Australia on your watch list for a final release. The Sphere Handbook lists minimum standards for disaster response by NGO’s, governments and relief agencies. 400 organizations in 80 countries contributed in many languages to 8 common standards (participation of the affected individuals in response planning, for example) and specific standards in water & sanitation, food, shelter and health services. The Sphere Project also published a Humanitarian Charter in 2004 that expresses the commitment of relief agencies to the Sphere minimum standards.
Have you seen the disaster movie “2012″? A friend from Control Risks and I did, and we reluctantly concluded we wouldn’t be able to write off the cost of our tickets as a professional development expense. Spoiler: In the movie, China saves the human race, and all the American political leaders are black people. Selected individuals from many nations climb into giant arks to float to safety when a deluge engulfs the earth. The sun comes out in the happily ever after. Who says the Bible doesn’t have something to teach emergency managers? I even saw a press release that tried to draw “lessons” and dignified talking points out of the film’s computer-generated calamities. Then the
There is no such thing as a blood test for influenza. If you’ve been searching for one, you can stop.
Influenza is a respiratory disease, so specimens preferred for influenza testing come from the respiratory system: nasopharyngeal swab (from the upper part of the throat behind the nose), nasopharyngeal swab combined with oropharyngeal swab (from the cavity at the back of your mouth), or “nasal aspirate” (translation: “snot”). If specimens from those locations cannot be collected, a nasal swab or oropharyngeal swab by itself will work.But not a blood sample. You can read the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on collecting, storing, processing and testing influenza specimens. Swabs, not syringes. As a colleague related in his account of being tested for H1N1 last month, Tan Tock Seng Hospital in Singapore took a blood sample from him when he went to be tested for influenza. When he asked why, he was told only that it was ‘to be sure you don’t have anything else.’
Wearing an N95 mask - or any other kind of mask - will not prevent you from getting influenza, and buying multiple masks for each employee in your office as a pandemic preparation measure is wasteful and unnecessary. It will be more effective to get them to wash their hands regularly, because a primary transmission route for influenza is contact with an infected surface.
In an office, masks are for the sick people, not for the well people. A mask will prevent someone in your office who is sneezing or coughing from spraying saliva, “snot” and “germs” on you and your colleagues by trapping mucus inside the mask.  How many sick people do you knowingly let into your office these days? None. You don’t need any masks for them. You keep them out of the office by screening at the building entrance. How many sick people do you expect to get into your office in the next twelve months? I wrote in September 2006 that my best guess was that about 20% of a company’s headcount, including visitors and vendors, would catch the flu in any one year. Your company could buy masks for those people, I suppose, if you expect all of them to ignore sensible advice and come into the office sick.
A colleague of mine returned to Singapore on Wednesday, May 27 from Boston, USA, where he’d spent the week between May 17 and May 24. He came back with a cold, a bad one. He was sure it was a cold, not the flu: his temperature had not gone over 36 degrees C (98 F), he had no fever, no headache, no chills. He had cleared the thermal screening at Singapore’s Changi Airport. But he had a meeting with a client scheduled on Friday, May 29, so he informed the client on Thursday, May 28 of his condition. The client asked him to (quoting the client’s e-mail) “get clearance from a doctor that it is just a common cold, and not something serious” before coming to their office. He called his doctor on Friday morning, 29 May. This is his first-hand, contemporaneous account of his experience as a suspected carrier of H1N1. 9.40 Call my doctor. All patients who have been to Mexico, USA or Canada and who have any of the flu symptoms, have to go to Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) by ambulance. [TTSH is Ground Zero for infectious disease in Singapore. It was the focal point for response to SARS, H5N1 “bird flu” and now H1N1 “swine flu”. Five TTSH health care workers died of SARS in 2003 as a result of caring for patients.
I can find no clinical evidence that Roche’s Tamiflu is more effective than GlaxoSmithKline’s less-prescribed Relenza against Type A influenza like H1N1 and H5N1.
I have found abundant evidence, however, that Switzerland-based Roche has run marketing circles around U.K.-based GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) by emphasizing the convenience of swallowing a Tamiflu capsule over the hassle of inhaling Relenza powder. That’s the only reason I can imagine why a dose of Tamiflu is two to three times as expensive as a dose of Relenza. A dose of 75mg Tamiflu costs US$5 to US$10 at Internet pharmacies, but a dose of 5mg Relenza costs only US$2.50 to US$3.50. Both require prescriptions. If the target population covered by your business continuity plan includes a large number of children, you will prefer a Tamiflu caplet that is easier for children to swallow. But, for adults, inhaling Relenza is just as effective, much less expensive, and more readily available than Tamiflu at doctors’ offices and pharmacies in Asia. If this isn’t a business school case study in the importance of packaging, it surely will be.
It can be tough to justify the value of a BCP job these days. The biggest threat most professionals worry about these days is unemployment: our own. Here are three ideas to mitigate that risk that will increase a BCP manager’s value to an organization. • Cut something. Chop down your emergency notification call “tree”. The objective is to free up BCP professionals for more valuable work. The call “tree” has been a standard emergency notification strategy since mobile phones were invented: in an emergency, one person calls someone, who calls someone else, who calls someone else. Maintaining a call tree is like maintaining a real tree: it takes time to prune dead branches and to grow new ones. The maintenance effort is tedious and menial, and its results are hard to see. People forget their lists or have out-of-date numbers. Mobile phone lines are always jammed after an incident. Notifying everyone takes far too long.
The Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre invites you to attend a one week resident course on “Incident Command System (ICS) for Disaster Management” from 10-16 August 2009 in Phuket, Thailand. This is the first time ADPC has offered an ICS course, and one of the few places in Asia an ICS course is available.
The course offers an in-depth explanation of ICS structure and helps you learn to use ICS to manage an incident. To see the basics of ICS, have a look at these slides from the US Environmental Protection Agency. The outline of the course is in this course brochure. Visit the ADPC website for more information.
The faculty includes emergency management experts from ADPC and the U.S. Forest Service, supplemented by experienced international practitioners and experts from different organizations and government institutions across the world. The IAEM Asia Council expects to contribute faculty to the program. IAEM member Mr. Falak Nawaz is Training Director at the ADPC.
I have upbraided SPRING Singapore and the Singapore Business Federation for failing to promote effectively Singapore’s erstwhile business continuity management (BCM) standard TR 19 between its birth in 2005 and its demise in 2008. But for stealth and invisibility, it’s hard to beat the clandestine work of Malaysia’s national standards company, SIRIM Berhad, on behalf of MS1970, Malaysia’s national BCM standard. Yes, there is one. Surprised? Me, too. I discovered it in January. The chairman of the committee that developed it wrote me that it was released in May 2007, but I couldn’t find it anywhere in the SIRIM catalog of standards published since 2007 (searching for “1970″). If you search for “Malaysia BCM standard” in your browser, the committee chairman’s presentation slides about MS1970 comes up with a link to the Malaysian government’s Computer Emergency Response Team web site. It takes some effort to discover that you can buy MS1970 at the Malaysian Standards Online site. Note the warning at the bottom of that screen that the standard can only be downloaded in Malaysia, which may explain why its existence has been unknown to the outside world.
Need help? In Singapore, call: +65 6324-3091 Fax: +65 6324-3093 Email: info@calamity.com.sg
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