Collaboration
Achieving Recovery Time Objectives
When something disrupts your business, and it becomes necessary to invoke IT Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity plans, it is likely that multiple plans will have to be activated simultaneously. To prevent chaos, it is imperative that Crisis Managers, Incident Commanders and recovery teams be able to collaborate. These teams must have the means to exchange information, raise issues and communicate the status of plan execution.
CommandCentre enables two-way communication. While the Incident Management team has a need to impose control (issuing instructions and directing teams) they also need feedback from those teams to manage recovery. Teams need direction, but they also need to be able to escalate issues to their Incident Commanders or Crisis Management team. Teams need the freedom to make decisions about the execution of their plans, but must have the means to make other teams aware of those changes. CommandCentre provides Incident Managers and responder teams the tools to collaborate effectively.
Responder teams must also be able to collaborate with each other. Execution of one plan may be dependent on completion of an action or task by another team executing some other plan. Because of the way Toolkit's plans are created (assigning timelines and predecessors to individual plan procedures) those dependencies are optimized through CommandCentre, even dependencies between different plans). This optimization ensures that recovery teams are automatically notified when a predecessor action is completed, allowing them to progress in a timely fashion.
Because recovery teams may be geographically dispersed (operating from multiple locations) or operating remotely (off-site or from home), CommandCentre also helps team members to collaborate. This allows real-time decisions where team members may take on specific tasks and then "hand off" tasks to other members. This hand off is especially important when a task takes a long time to complete, or requires repetition over a long time period.
The ability to collaborate during a disruption is crucial to a successful resolution. CommandCentre is designed to make collaboration as easy and effective as possible.
Optional BlackBerry integration allows responders to update the status of their plan procedure execution and collaborate with other responders and crisis managers using their BlackBerry device.