Principles and Practice of Business Continuity: Tools and Techniques, with CD-ROM

JIM BURTLES KLJ, MMLJ, FBCI is a well known international figure in the business continuity profession with 30 years of experience spread across 22 countries. He is a founding fellow of the Business Continuity Institute where he has served as a director for over ten years. As the original Standards Officer, he was heavily involved in the evolution of its professional standards and ethics. He received the freedom of the City of London in 1992 and was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by his peers in 2001. During 2004 he worked with the Cabinet Office in the United Kingdom, helping to develop their guidance material to support the Civil Contingencies Act (2004). He also represents the business community on the London Regional Resilience Team which is the central coordinating body for London’s response to an emergency. In 2005 he was granted the rank of a Knight of Grace in the Military and Hospitaller Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem. Originally a research engineer involved in the development of early transistor technology in the late 1950s, he joined IBM as a service engineer in 1969. During his eighteen years with IBM, he was at the forefront of the emerging business continuity profession. His first involvement with Disaster Recovery (or DR) was in 1976 as the field engineer responsible for repairing and recovering a critical banking system that had been struck by lightning. Later he became a systems engineer, advising customers on such matters as system performance and reliability. He went on to become IBM’s disaster recovery country specialist before joining Safetynet as their principal consultant in 1987. (Safetynet was a leading small systems disaster recovery service which was subsequently acquired by Sungard). In 1995 he was appointed as a director of Corporate Integrity where he was head of training until they were acquired by Adam Associates in 2000. Two years later he set out on his own as the principal of Total Continuity Management, where he now focuses on executive-level training and support for Business Continuity Management and the development of specialist emergency response skills. During the early years he played a leading role in the development and expansion of disaster recovery principles and practices. Since then he has been instrumental in maturing those early pioneering methods into the professional skill set of the modern business continuity manager. When he first became involved in the subject there was no body of knowledge to refer to, nothing had been published. Indeed, very few people had even though about business continuity; so he set about inventing and developing ideas and theories to explain what the problems might be and how we could solve them. For example, the backlog trap, now accepted by almost everyone as a fact of life, was an early development of his which paved the way for a more constructive approach to business resilience. His practical experience includes hands-on recovery work withBurtles, Jim is the author of 'Principles and Practice of Business Continuity: Tools and Techniques, with CD-ROM', published 2007 under ISBN 9781931332392 and ISBN 1931332398.