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"We had six people working from ICM's Business Continuity centre recently when we had a problem with our telephony system. It's good to know that we can rely on ICM, their outstanding technical support and flexibility is reassuring"

Central Borders Housing Group

• • Housing Associations and Business Continuity Overview
  • Business Continuity Services for Housing Associations
  • Best Value
  • The Route Map to Business Continuity Management
  • Business Continuity and Internal Auditing

Best Value

Because Housing Associations are not for profit social businesses, their need to optimise the effective use of budgets is paramount. ICM's experience within this environment means that we can work with housing associations of all sizes to ensure business continuity spend is effective and limited to those functions which are most critical and need to be continuous in order to support housing communities.

In addition, the process of business continuity management can help housing associations to satisfy some of the performance standards and codes of best practice defined by the Housing Corporation.

Business Continuity planning looks at all aspects of your operation to identify vital services that need to continue no matter what, and the elements that enable their delivery to your tenants. These elements might be people, processes, IT, communication, external suppliers or indeed any factor that contributes to the delivery of a public service. It then establishes procedures for protecting those parts of the whole, without which critical services could not be delivered.

A business continuity review sets out to establish the most effective way to recover a housing association's operations in the event of any business interruption. Taking a step back and evaluating business processes can lead to surprising revelations about existing and possibly out-dated methods, enabling these to be updated and improving business processes and increasing efficiency in daily operations.

In assessing the function of IT, business continuity planning could lead to the development of new or improved ways of utilising technology to perform and safeguard the day-to-day tasks involved in delivering tenant services.

Another key area that business continuity planning often highlights is potential threats to service delivery through analysing the supply chain. Consolidating suppliers can drive down costs, but leave an association more vulnerable in the event that a key supplier suffered a disruption and was unable to provide products and services within their contracted terms. In addressing this and considering alternative suppliers, cheaper or improved supply options may be discovered.

Because business continuity planning is such an all-inclusive discipline, it can help to deliver real value and assist in meeting best value performance indicators for the Association as a whole.