Workshop Resume

I'm back for some days and I now want to give you a short feedback.
The workshop about Business Continuity Management was quite ok. The most interesting part was the practical part in the second half of the day.

Nevertheless it was hard for me to stay awake, not because the topics were boring, but after 8h overnight train and nearly no sleep, sticky air, ... *yaaaawn*

However, even if the topics were quite interesting, the workshop was not worthy the effort. First of all the wasted time in the train and secondly the money of course. 14h ours train (linz - frankfurt and back) 39€ + 39€, local trains (st. valentin - linz and back, frankfurt - darmstadt and back) 4,10€ + 4,10€ + 6,75€ + 6,75€, a room for one night 70€, tramway 1,45€ + 1,45€ and the workshop itself 35€ (student price).

I recommend doing it another way, for example booking a cheap flight as early as possible. (when I tried to book flight also would have cost 250€)

About the content:
The first speaker was from the BSI UK. This is the organization which created the BCM-standard BS25999. The topic should have been BS25999-2:Specification .. . But unfortunately it was mostly about part one of the standard, not part two. So nothing new for me in that case. But afterwards I asked the speaker some questions, so it was a bit helpful at all.

The second topic was "the concrete procedure in a BCM project". I disagreed a lot with the speaker. He has a lot of experience in the field of Disaster Recovery, but his mapping from "there way to implement BCM" to the 25999 standard was ... hmm... let's say, not how I understand it. One example, he always talked about assets and continuity of this assets. But in BCM normally you always talk about (business) processes and the continuity of those.

After a short coffee break the chairman and professor of the TU Darmstadt talked about how to measure efficiency of BCM. This topic was quite interesting, even if I do not need it for my master thesis. It was a mathematical approach how to calculate an efficiency value. You can calculate a result without even testing the BCM approach . It was very theoretical, but something different and interesting.

After lunch there was a presentation about a doctoral thesis. It was ok, but not very exciting. Would be nice to read the whole dissertation, because in such a "short" presentation it is only possible to get an idea of the content.

Then there was a presentation about the human factor in BCM,.... sorry can't tell you anything, I was too much concentrating of not falling asleep. (not the presentation, the followings of the train trip ^^)

The last two presentations were about practical implementations at Siemens and BMW. Those were also very nice and useful to get an inside view to a practical implementation.