Foreword

Providing continuity in the face of a disruptive event is an important issue to be considered by boards, chief executives and senior management in public sector entities,¹ not-for-profit organisations and businesses. There are sufficient examples in today’s world to demonstrate that events that can seem unlikely do happen. Many services delivered by public sector entities are essential to the economic and social well-being of our society - a failure to deliver these could have significant consequences for those concerned and for the nation.

The previous version of this guide, Business Continuity Management: Keeping the wheels in motion (2000) assisted entities to plan for the continued delivery of critical business processes in the event of business disruption. This is more simply referred to as business continuity.

Business continuity management is an essential component of good public sector governance. It is part of an entity’s overall approach to effective risk management, and should be closely aligned to the entity’s incident management, emergency response management and IT disaster recovery. Successful business continuity management requires a commitment from the entity’s executive to raising awareness and implementing sound approaches to build resilience. The importance of becoming a resilient entity is integral to contemporary business continuity practices, and we have named this guide Business Continuity Management: Building resilience in public sector entities. This edition refreshes and updates the contents of the previous guide.

While practices described in this publication generally provide guidance to entities, it is important that each entity assesses the extent to which the information provided is relevant, appropriate and cost-effective in light of its own individual circumstances.
This guide has been prepared with contributions and insights from a number of entities and businesses. The assistance of Ernst and Young in updating this guide is also recognised and appreciated.

Ian McPhee
Auditor-General June 2009

¹ _{For the purposes of this guide, the term entity is used to collectively refer to an Agency, Commonwealth authority and subsidiary, and Commonwealth company and subsidiary, as defined in the Auditor-General Act 1997.}