It’s the last day of the BCI’s Education Month! In today’s bulletin, Charlie writes about the importance of mentoring in learning about business continuity and shares his experiences of the use of AI in the business continuity profession.
It is exciting to be on the cusp of a revolution where, as some say, the change will be as dramatic and far-reaching as the industrial revolution. In my lifetime, I have seen the world transformed by the internet, but some say that the changes brought on by AI will be even more profound. One of the exciting things about being part of change is how it is going to affect you personally; your job, your private life, and your profession. In the office, we have very much embraced AI, and all of us are trying to find the best use for it and how it is going to make us more efficient – more of this in another bulletin! One of the other discussions we are having in the office is will AI make us redundant? This is especially pertinent for us in the knowledge industry, as we know AI is pretty knowledgeable about business continuity and crisis management. The question is also how the younger generation in the profession will learn and get the skills and experience to be an experienced practitioner.
My own path to business continuity is more of an old-school path into the profession. I was in the army for 5 years, and much of the basic BC learning, I gained during that time. The army provided you with leadership training as well as how to plan and execute operations. Often in business continuity, we spend most of our time planning and exercising, but we do not spend much time actually implementing our plans and responding. In the army you have to do both, and if you are in active service, and you do not plan correctly, this could lead to you or your soldiers becoming casualties and the mission not being achieved. This is where theory meets practice, and you have to learn quickly. When I had my first emergency planning job, my first outside the army, luckily I was right at the beginning of the emergency planning profession starting, so there was not a tried and tested way of doing things. You learned from others. In the water industry, we were very collaborative, so if you had a good plan or lessons learned, you shared these with all your peers, hoping they would adapt it. Imitation was flattery. Similarly, I was there at the beginning of business continuity being invented and again, learned from others, books, and mentoring of senior managers in the power company I was working in. Since being a consultant for the last 18 years, I have learned from seminars, lots of reading, writing standards, sharing ideas and debating concepts. Being a teacher of our Cyber Incident Management course or the BCI’s CBCI course means you have to be able to understand the subject in detail yourself, before you can teach it to others.
The path of going into the emergency services or military is still there, so that can still be an entry into the BC profession. There are also university degree courses in Business Continuity or Risk Management, which were not around when I was at university. I am not totally convinced by the practical usefulness of these courses and you still need a lot of on-the-job training to be able to do something practical and actually produce business continuity products.
Most commentators on AI say that it is not the highly skilled workers who will be impacted by AI. This is because AI can hallucinate and you need to have experience to understand its answers in context. I use AI to give me ideas and to rewrite text, but you cannot take the text straight, it has to be checked and usually tweaked. So by the time AI can do my job to the same quality, I hope to be away in the great business continuity paradise in the sky!
For me, the key question is will AI do away with the BC entry jobs which many practitioners use to develop their skills. My personal feeling is that there may be fewer jobs around because AI will make practitioners more efficient, but this will be minimal. This is because much of what we do is human interaction. Some of our job is chasing people to check whether they have updated their plans or procedures, which is probably better done by people. Updating plans and procedures requires judgement and local business knowledge, training, and people prefer real people training them rather than an avatar and exercises, AI can assist in their planning but it can’t run and report on them. Some of the tasks around the BIA and dealing with data might be helped by AI, but it still requires judgement which humans provide.
All of us who have business continuity jobs should be constantly upskilling ourselves both on the job but also learning from those we work with, and those we come into contact with. We should all be learning and consuming business continuity knowledge. There are so many different ways to consume and learn, from documentaries on disasters, YouTube, podcasts, papers, formal training (face-to-face and online), webinars – there should be no excuse for not learning as every type of way of consuming knowledge is catered for. If you can find someone to mentor you then do so. People love sharing their knowledge, and many of us like the sound of our own voices and can talk all day on the subject!
In conclusion, AI is going to change the way we deliver business continuity and make us more efficient, but it is not going to change our profession materially. What I think we need to do is to keep learning, because once you are at the stage when you use AI to produce materials, but you have to interpret it yourself, it is only then that you are in much a better position to ride the AI wave rather than sink below it.
