Supplier Availability Management: Organized Labor ? a Critical ...

Roberta J. Witty
Research VP
11 years at Gartner
33 years IT industry

Roberta Witty is a research VP in Gartner Research, where she is part of the Compliance, Risk and Leadership group. Her primary area of focus is business continuity management and disaster recovery. Ms. Witty is the role specialty lead for? Read Full Bio

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by Roberta J. Witty ?|? January 15, 2013 ?|? Submit a Comment

For the first time in more than three decades,?NYC is gearing up for a strike on Wednesday January 16, 2013 by the city?s largest school bus driver union: Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union: NYC Department of Education: Pupil Transportation? and ?School Bus Drivers? Union Calls for Strike on Wednesday?. ?This strike announcement set off a rapid review of options for transporting students to NYC schools ranging from putting students on a city bus or subway to paying parents mileage when they drive their child to school.

It also highlights the need to be prepared for an outage ? intentional or not ? of all suppliers to your business processes not just your IT vendors. Organized labor must be considered as a supplier of business services and you better have a contingency plan in place well ahead of a strike. As additional guidance, do not announce a change of supplier or potential change of a supplier until that contingency plan is in place and tested ? at least through a tabletop exercise.

It won?t be pretty tomorrow morning: disabled children and those too young to be on a city bus or subway seem to be particularly at risk of not getting to school. We could see the second largest workforce availability issue for city agencies and private enterprises since Superstorm Sandy in October/2012 as parents will be late to work or not show up at all because their kids will be home.

I hope you are prepared?somehow I think many aren?t.

Category: Event ? ? Tags: BCM, Business Continuity Management, Contingency Planning, crisis communications, Crisis Management, Department of Education, NYC, organized labor, strike, Workforce Continuity, workforce resilience

Source: http://blogs.gartner.com/business-continuity/2013/01/15/supplier-availability-management-organized-labor-a-critical-workforce-supplier/

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