The Business Continuity Maturity Model® (BCMM®) is a free open access tool created to assist businesses in building and maintaining a sustainable BC program. New standards for business continuity are continuously emerging, pressuring BC managers to find a business continuity program diagnostic tool that is objective, consistent and repeatable. Unlike published standards that define program criteria, the BCMM® provides you with the steps to take on the path toward compliance. 

While there are a number of companies that can provide a proprietary evaluation, the challenge is to find a globally recognized and applied tool that is based on measurable program milestones. The BCMM® helps organizations achieve their desired resiliency level by providing answers to the following questions: 

• Where are we now?
• Where do we ultimately want to be?
• Where should we be next? 

The BCMM® is a tool for businesses of all sizes to perform self-assessments and assist in improving their ability to recover from a disruption. The BCMM® provides a consistent, objective means for evaluating a company’s state of preparedness, including evaluation criteria in 8 critical corporate competencies across 6 levels. These competencies address business continuity program considerations including, but not limited to the traditional areas of business recovery, security management, incident management and technology recovery.

Since October of 2003, BC professionals in over 40 countries have viewed the open access BCMM®. The Model has been translated into Spanish by our partner, Disaster Recovery Services Mexico, who provides training and presentations in Spanish speaking countries.

Use the results of your self-assessment to identify your program’s strengths and weaknesses. Identify gaps in your current implementation strategy, evaluate your planned BC activities and generate data that will help substantiate and support recommended changes that can lead to significant improvements in your business continuity program. Justify budget requests and achieve executive “buy in” by quantifying the resilience of your business. The BCMM® is a tool that can be applied and leveraged in the evaluation and selection of critical supply chain or strategic business partners and in the determination of the quality of their contingency programs. 

The concept for the BCMM® emerged when Virtual Corporation’s President, Scott Ream, spoke with business continuity professionals regarding the need to find a way to objectively benchmark their business continuity management (BCM) programs. Since then, several surveys have been conducted and published describing performance by industry, company size and other demographics. A working team comprised of cross-industry practitioners was formed as the instrument through which experience, consultation, and advice could be harvested. Working team members came from a variety of industries, including telecommunications, manufacturing, energy, and banking.

Virtual Corporation conducts 2-day training seminars for business continuity professionals to become licensed BCMM® assessors. Virtual Corporation has trained assessors from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, England, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Korea. Participants who have successfully completed the 2-day training class will be trained in the methodology of performing both the review and audit level assessments and will be prepared to conduct assessments both as an internal corporate resource/service or as an external private consultant/service. 

The open access version of the BCMM® (English or Español), can be downloaded at no charge. Email addresses will not be used for any purpose other than providing news and updates to the BCMM®.