Category talk:Disaster management tools

message: You can find some documents and best practices here:
 
BS 25999-1:2006 Code of practice in Business Continuity Management
BS 25999  Business Continuity Self-Assessment Tool
PAS 77:2006 IT Service Continuity Management.
BCM tools
BCM software tools are instrumental for reducing the time and effort required to develop a uniform method for creating business-continuance plans and establishing a repeatable process for maintaining the effectiveness of emergency response plans 
During the past years, a number of new BCM software tools have emerged that will help organizations plan and react to business and operational threats. These tools help organizations to:
 Automate the workflow of contingency plan development with business and information technology stakeholders
 Assess and quantify the impact of any business interruption
 Manage and distribute business-continuity and recovery plans across all business units and departments
 Automate the BCM plan's change management process
 Respond more quickly to "trigger events"
A BCM tool should have the ability to define business relationships and their associated people, facility and technology dependencies.
What is a Business Continuity Plan?
A clean, easy to read, easy to use and always up to date set of procedures and steps in  tool/documents stored in a Business Continuity Management Tool
A complete BCM tool, minimal objective
BCM tools must first organize the planning process, speeding it along without losing important information. 
After the initial creation of the business continuity plan, the long-term value of BCM tools resides in their capabilities to keep the plan current and viable, preferably with automatically generated reminders to stakeholders with update responsibility.
Three families of  BCM tools
Basic BCM software are Traditional planning software working as a "Document Control Center" providing  document-format questionnaires for BCP to ensure thorough analysis and response planning. (All is static, no link between data inside forms)
More sophisticated BCM tools collect questionnaire responses into databases that integrate with the corporation’s data platform and structures. Can give dynamic views of all relationships and answer to “What if?” (links between data in the forms, to verify data relationship )
Expert BCM software will add connections to crisis and incident management for tracking . Able to define priorities depending on the event, generate reports and update all steps in each plan for all  business units, then send notifications through CD , laptop, PDA …e-mail
A complete BCM tool, must have?
Facilitates a commonly shared and logistically structured BC process across the organization.
Implements updates to the plan quickly and efficiently (for example, automatically updating the plan’s call-list records with employees’ latest contact information when the corporate employee database changes).
Distributes those updates to key individuals on the disaster-recovery teams.
Notify  employees promptly of emergency actions to take, according to company BCP.  
Central version control and integration.
Export and import of diverse reporting formats.
It is easy to use, flexible and intuitive.
It is scalable to meet the needs of even the world’s largest organizations.
It is open to new ideas.
--Courtox 08:22, 30 October 2007 (UTC)