Study of period-dividing method for Business Impact Analysis by hierarchical clustering

Abstract

Business Continuity Management (BCM) aims to enable on an organization to continue to business operations, even when it is afflicted by untoward situations, such as earthquake. In BCM, the organization is required to implement Chronologic Impact Analysis (CIA) as a part of Business Impact Analysis (BIA). In CIA, the organization must divide the period after business disruption into intervals and analyze the impact of the disruption or the decline of operational capability within each interval. In most cases, the period-dividing method in CIA is implemented using the “Irregular Incremental Method (IIM)” (named by the author). The IIM has a demerit that often makes execution of CIA difficult. This study proposes an algorithm to improve this difficulty. The algorithm uses Current Recoverable Time (CRT) as the input data, and cluster analysis to develop the period intervals. In addition, a case study is implemented to prove the efficiency of this method.