How BCPs Have Changed – Case Study from COVID-19

Abstract

The explosion of COVID-19 infection hit the world in 2020, which prompted the Japanese government to declare a state of emergency and require society to refrain from going outdoors and promote working from home. Although there was a lot of confusion on the side of employees and businesses at the beginning of the introduction of remote work, it gradually took root, there were differences depending on the industry. The introduction of remote work has overturned the common sense of Japanese companies that used to require employees to come to the office to work, and has improved the level of business continuity planning (BCP) measures. This can be said to be the result of changing the BCP measures and strategies, which immediately eliminated the bottlenecks in the priority operations group. It is interesting to note that the external pressure has led to a reconsideration of measures and strategies that had been assumed to be sufficient. This note focuses on cases where measures and strategies that were not selected as earthquake countermeasures were selected as countermeasures to COVID-19 and consequently led to the strengthening of earthquake countermeasures. This fact could be applied to further discuss the relationship between countermeasures and unavailable resources and discuss the need for a shared risk assessment model for multi-stakeholder BCP development such as Area Business Continuity Management (BCM) [1].