“I have yet to be in a game where luck was involved. Well-prepared players make plays. I have yet to be in a game where the most prepared team didn’t win.” Urban Meyers
If you’re a high level executive or business owner and you’re not concerned about the possible Swine Flu Pandemic, maybe you should be.
Around June of 2009, the World Health Organization raised the Pandemic level for the Swine Flu to level 6, the top level on their scale. As an executive or business owner, you may want to consider how this can impact your business or department and what you need to do about it. Recent articles have highlighted staggering predictions about the spread of the H1N1 and how many people could become infected in the U.S. alone.
Admittedly, this was not something I was thinking about until this week. A client invited me to lunch and introduced me to George, the firm’s business continuity specialist. George has been following the issue for sometime, and is now 90% convinced that the H1N1 virus could potentially pose a threat to the ongoing operations for their business. George is concerned that up to 50% or more of their staff could see some downtime of the next 6 months or more, either because they go down with the flu themselves, or have to stay home to take care of a family member. Additionally, some staff may choose to stay home rather than come into work for fear of being infected.
Even though George was making sure cross training was taking place in the firm, he was still very uncomfortable allowing that to become his entire solution, especially in the I.T. area. In a worst case scenario, he felt very uncomfortable relying solely cross training, feeling that is would still leaving huge holes in the technical staff that would need to be filled very quickly.
He thought about contracting with consulting firms, but that would require the consultants to be on site, taking more risk of exposing the uninfected. George also surmised that pricing for consulting firm services would be very high, reflecting both risk and strong demand elements, as many other, less prepared firms would also be clamoring for any available resources.
George felt that the best solution would be to have remote resources available at a moments notice. George recognized that remote resources would have much less exposure to the H1N1 virus, and would probably cost much less than contracting consultants to work on site. Given this realization, and having a prior understanding of our Homeland Onshore Model, (HOM), this client asked us to get involved in their Pandemic Planning.
If you have some level of responsibility for Pandemic Planning in your business and would like to understand more about how the Homeland Onshore Model can help reduce your risk, please see visit our web site or email us at inform@itonshore.com.
Posted by itonshore 
