Developing a contingency plan in advance

Contingency Planning in Business

Every business is challenged with circumstances that can have a beneficial or negative impact on its operations. To prepare for such an event, management must create a contingency plan ahead of time. The plan serves as a backup in the event of a calamity that disrupts production and puts staff in danger. It protects the accessible data, minimizes disturbance, and keeps all stakeholders as safe as possible. Some businesses may go years without needing to employ a contingency plan, but it is essential to have one, keep it up to date, and teach key stakeholders on what to do if the need arises (Van Assche, Duineveld & Beunen, 2014). For example, if IT outage such as loss of data occurs in business, and there was no good contingency plan which includes proper backup for the lost data, the company would not be able to trace any information concerning its transactions with are required for bookkeeping. Another instance is where a company’s website is hacked, and there are no plans for immediate response, some sensitive information may reach unauthorized individuals.

Examples of Contingency Planning Failures

The AT&T network collapse of 1990 is a living example of a case where failure to have a contingency plan led to technical disaster. The company suffered a minor mechanical problem after an error occurred in a single line of code (Sutton, 2013). Even though it was corrected, the issued affected citizens of the U.S. with several calls going unanswered on the eve of the occasion. The company has since added a highly complex software upgrade to prevent such happenings in the future.

On the other hand, EDS and the Child Support Agency disaster of 2004 did not go well following the billions of taxpayers’ money lost. ED’s CS2 computer system overpaid around 1.9 million people due to a technical problem which was not detected at the correct time (Willcocks, Cullen & Craig, 2010). Later, a complex IT system was brought in, and measures were put in place to identify such occurrences at the right time.

References

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Sutton, D. (2013). Large Scale Physical Disruptions in the Electronic Communication Sector: Theory or Reality?. In Critical Information Infrastructure Protection and Resilience in the ICT Sector (pp. 50-60). IGI Global.

Van Assche, K., Duineveld, M., & Beunen, R. (2014). Power and contingency in planning. Environment and Planning A, 46(10), 2385-2400.

Willcocks, L., Cullen, S., & Craig, A. (2010). The outsourcing enterprise: From cost management to collaborative innovation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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