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Stealing from checked baggage
London Police is not a "force", but "service providers"
Is BCM a profession?
Most industrial parks don't include SCUBA divers in their recovery plans. But car companies and a shoe maker in Thailand - but nowhere near the ocean - had to hire divers to retrieve hard-to-replace moulds from submerged factories in November. "No one thought about such a worst-case scenario", said one company president. "In future we will need to reconsider the flood risk."They sure will. Three (3) major rivers - the Chao Phraya, Lopburi and Pa Sak - converge around the industrial estates in Ayutthaya. But companies obviously decided that tax incentives and the proximity of suppliers outweighed the risks of catastrophic flooding. Or maybe they just skipped a risk assessment entirely.
Supply chain resilience strategy: don’t build a shoe-, car- or disk drive factory in a floodplain. Some companies may even avoid Thailand. Impact: if one Japanese multinational were to choose, say, Vietnam or Myanmar for its next factory, others would follow, beginning a chain of falling dominoes for Thailand - eventually. Prime Minister Shinawatra’s crisis management effort is just beginning.
In addition to flooding and storms, risks in Asia include volcanoes, earthquakes and volcanoes with earthquakes - not generally worries in Europe or North America.
Here's an eerie, chilling video from inside a car caught in Japan's March 2011 tsunami. I'd really like a full English translation of the audio narration. At the end, the narrator apparently says, "The vehicle hit a building and sank." I hope I never get closer than this to drowning in a tsunami.
Everybody’s favourite pastime: comparing themselves with others! Complete the KPMG-Continuity Insights BCM Program Benchmarking survey and maybe win this Amazon Kindle Fire.
They say it takes twenty (20) minutes to complete; the deadline is 15 January 2012. To hear how your BCM program compares to everyone else’s, register for the Continuity Insights conference in Scottsdale, Arizona (USA) in April 2012. Or just read the May 2012 issue of Continuity Insights magazine. Here are the 2007 KPMG-CI Benchmarking Survey results, for comparison.
Everybody’s other favourite pastime: comparing salaries! The deadline is 31 December for recruiter BC Management’s Asia BCM compensation study. Click here to complete the survey. Results for 2010: 27% of BCM people in Asia get SGD 50K or less per year, 23% get up to SGD 100K and another 23% get up to SGD150K. 75% of the SGD 50K or less were in India. View the chart for Asia Pacific. Hey, you do this for love, not money, right? When you complete the Asia BCM compensation study, you get a free copy. Pass it on to your HR department.
This 2.5 minute video showing how to break into your suitcase without unlocking it got my attention. Like millions of travellers, I have a bag just like that.My hard-sided suitcase was ransacked in the United States last March. I checked it at an airport. When I opened my suitcase in Singapore, a brand-new iPad2 was missing; its box was still inside, but empty. Nothing else was taken or disturbed. A thief can’t be that precise without inside help, probably from someone at an x-ray machine, right? I figure that narrows it down to baggage handlers or Transportation Security Administration personnel at CLT or EWR airports, where I changed planes. I filed a report within the U.S. and with the Singapore police. I eventually got SGD500 from my travel insurance company.
- If a TSA employee in Newark stole my iPad, I wasn’t the first victim: http://usat.ly/nRaLXC
- Because TSA screens things - bags, laptops, shoes, baby bottles, knitting needles - not people, it will inevitably find “bad” things but not bad guys. DHS Secretary Napolitano finally agrees: http://usat.ly/nxlCCO
- I’ve railed about American airline transportation silliness before: http://bit.ly/smhoiD
- A former U.S. Senator suggested last month that TSA be abolished http://bit.ly/sYiB39. Then he fell down and hit his head Probably no connection
Perhaps it’s not surprising that last August’s rioting in London got out of control so quickly. My colleague and former 
Metropolitan Police officer Peter Power wrote afterward in The Telegraph that changes in public expectation of what police should do reduced their abilities to respond properly. Peter wrote,
As P.J. Waddington says in his book 'The Strong Arm of the Law': ‘The legitimacy of the police in Britain has traditionally been founded not upon conformity to popular wishes, but upon impartiality.’ [T]he force is crippled by a devotion to community consent in a country that has become a patchwork of discrete and often intolerant communities. [A] dispirited police force... truly stopped being a force, preferring instead to now be a ‘service provider'.
A service provider is a vendor. Would you ever let a vendor put you in handcuffs? Or in jail? OK, I can hear the jokes already...
Even if cartoonists still call it “disaster recovery,” maybe we’re in a profession after all if it’s in Dilbert comic strips. Here are Dilbert cartoons with ‘disaster recovery’ as the theme. Thanks to Scot Phelps of the Emergency Management Academy.
Outsource Your BCP Work in Asia
Need help but can't afford a full-time BCP professional? We outsource qualified BCP professionals for as little as one (1) day or two (2) days per week on contract. Read our Capability Statement with case studies of our satisfied clients over 15 years. Write to Nathaniel Forbes at nforbes@calamity.com.sg, or call +65 6324-3091 in Singapore (12 hours ahead of U.S. Eastern Time, 8 hours ahead of GMT or UTC).