Keep Calm, And Carry On: Business Continuity Planning In Parliaments.

• Author: Lynch, Tommy

For several years a group of legislatures have been working together to create guidance that will help similar organisations in considering business continuity planning necessary to maintain operations in the event of unexpected events or a crisis. In this article, the author outlines the progress of the work and explains how interested parties can get hold of the resulting guide which will be available from January 2019.

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In May 2014, the Clerk of the Scottish Parliament, Sir Paul Grice, met with his counterparts in Ottawa where the topic of business continuity cropped up. It became clear during the discussion that there would be mutual benefit if the House of Commons and the Scottish Parliament began sharing information on strategic plans, resources and approaches to business continuity.

Over the following months there were conference calls, regular email correspondence and the bilateral sharing of information between Ottawa and Edinburgh soon expanded to include representatives from the Canadian Senate, the UK Houses of Parliament in London, Provincial Legislative Assemblies based in Toronto and Victoria and, most recently, the House of Representatives in Wellington, New Zealand.

As we shared information, there were clearly areas of overlap. Moreover, some legislatures had particular areas of strength that other participants could learn and benefit from. Representatives from most of these organisations agreed to meet in Toronto in June 2015 to continue our discussion and gave our group a name--Legislative Assemblies Business Continuity Network or LABCoN.

Our first set of meetings focussed on direct comparison of our approaches to business continuity. We shared stories, noted our successes, and also lessons learned from work that could have gone better. The group created a questionnaire based on the international standard for business continuity, ISO 22301.

The Toronto meetings were very positive and the group, as well as sharing expertise and enthusiasm for business continuity, also hit it off personally. The extent of what we learned over those two days drove home the value of this information exchange to the group--there are undoubtedly other legislatures that could benefit from the knowledge and experience of participants if it could be captured and shared in some fashion.

Over the following months we agreed that creating a business continuity guide specifically for legislatures was the way forward. The guide would be based...