<p>Copyright TM Forum 2005<br/></p><p><br/></p><p><b>Extended Description</b><br/></p><p><br/></p><p>Business Continuity Management processes manage the development of strategies, policies, plans, organizational roles & responsibilities, and escalation procedures for ensuring continuation of business processes and activities in the event of serious and/or sustained interruption. These processes ensure that appropriate plans and procedures are established and tested to provide continuous operation, or controlled re-establishment, of key business processes and activities, to provide for a controlled recovery of infrastructure capability to normal levels, and for determination of operational accountability and processes until the abnormal circumstances are resolved. These processes have four major aspects:<br/></p><p><br/></p><p>- Business continuity planning which provides for the proactive planning and testing of business and operational procedure continuity;<br/></p><p>- Infrastructure recovery planning which provides for the pro-active determination of recovery and backup procedures for all key infrastructure capabilities, and their proactive testing;<br/></p><p>- Serious incident management planning which defines the operational roles and responsibilities, and proactively defines the operational procedures and escalation criteria which are initiated when abnormal operation circumstances occur; and<br/></p><p>- Business continuity management methodologies, which ensure consistent application of business continuity management across the enterprise.<br/></p><p><br/></p><p>Note that business continuity management is an extended process structure which incorporates disaster recovery planning.<br/></p><p><br/></p><p>Note that serious incident management is used instead of crisis management as serious disruption can occur to the business through events which would not normally be classified as a crisis.<br/></p>