A1 – Emergency Notification System Best Practices
Jeremy Gudgeon, Vanguard
Administrators of Emergency Notification Systems (ENS) find themselves on-point for the delivery of critical messages during crucial times. Examples of inaccurate activations have made their way into the news, creating a heightened sense of the need to establish a well-designed ENS program. This session will explore designing and maintaining an ENS program for business contingency response teams that establishes confidence in each activation. Looking at key aspects of Standard Operating Procedures, we’ll review methods that help provide the right message, to the right groups, with the right level of oversight and approval.

B1 – Creating A Risk Resilient Dream Team  
Annie Searle, University of Washington
What would a dream team look like for incident response and crisis management at your organization? This session reviews common roles for business continuity, cyber security and physical security, then looks at how that team from business continuity, cyber security and physical security could be put together to achieve optimum response no matter where the threat came from, including third party risk or insider threats as well as cyber-terrorists and nation state players. This session will examine the role of such a team to routinely examine threats that span their practice areas such as third-party risk and insider threats, and to simplify and streamline incident response across those areas.

B2 – BCI Insights – What’s Changing in 2019?

Heather Merchan, BCI USA Chapter, and Chris Horne, BCI Global Board Member
Join these presenters for an interactive discussion on the changes and surprises we are seeing emerge and evolve in BCI research.  We will arm participants with facts and figures, share insights as industry practitioners and learn from fellow peers in the room. Our focus will be on what’s new, what’s changing, and what should we be thinking and doing as a result.

C1 – Understanding the Closed Point-of-Dispensing Concept
Amy E. Bennett, T. Rowe Price
What is your business continuity plan for a pandemic? A closed POD plan provides associates peace of mind that they and their family members are safeguarded from public health emergencies so they can continue to work with less concern and distraction. Closed PODs are defined as public and private locations that have agreed to dispense medications, generally during a public health emergency, to the people who work there. This may be a viable option for organizations to partner with their state and local departments of health in order to support their business continuity plans (specifically for pandemic) and relieve the local communities of some of the burden to dispense mass prophylaxis to as many people as possible in a short amount of time.  

C2 – Six Keys to Keeping Your Program Under Control
Kim Hirsch, Fusion Risk Management
Every day, new risks and threats arise that can disrupt business operations. From increasingly unpredictable weather to cyber threats and supply chain outages, today’s business continuity and risk management programs need to more resilient than ever. This session outlines six key ways for you to maintain control over your program. These tips will not only improve your confidence, but strengthen the trust your organization has in your program’s ability to not only respond to disruptions, but proactively mitigate against them.

D1 – Risky Indicators
Michael Keating, RGA Reinsurance
Measurement is essential to the effectiveness of any risk management program, and business continuity management is no exception. Unfortunately, measuring activities we routinely perform can sometimes be an unreliable way to determine how well risk is being mitigated. How can we identify Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) that accurately tell the story of business resilience in the face of increasingly uncertain threats we face?  This session will cover how one company looked to identify and report on KRIs that were both simple enough that a Board member could understand them and meaningful enough to communicate a complex picture of overall preparedness. The session will end with an interactive exercise with participants developing KRI for a fictional company.