A12 – So You Have a Disaster… Now What?
Tom Serio, MTS & Associates
The presenter will walk you through a real disaster that impacted a large business and forced them to enact ALL of their business continuity plans. What’s the reality of the situation? What’s were upper management thinking? How do quickly and successfully did employees get back to work? Learn from some very valuable and real lessons learned while recovering a corporate campus from a nine-day outage.

B16 – How to Develop Your BC/DR Program to Maximize the Use of Mobile Devices
Andrew Witts, BC in the Cloud
The continuing shift in the traditional workforce means fewer people in the office and more people working from home. It also means that instant access to work-related applications and data must be reliably available anytime, anywhere. In the BC/DR field, many software applications offer mobile app options. Are you using them? Many organizations focus on developing well-built plans for their programs, but have we all explored and implemented well developed and cohesive use of mobile devices? This session will explore the use of mobile devices in BC/DR at a program level, some best practices and risks to avoid in doing so. 

C16 – Incident Command System – Implementation and Integration in Business Continuity

Ralph Davis, Longenecker and Associates, and Joe Layman, Molina Healthcare, Inc.
The presenters will describe the history of ICS since the 9/11 attacks and how business can use free FEMA materials to create and implement their Incident Command System. They’ll also discuss why it is important to know ICS and the national efforts to standardize this system at all government levels. Additionally, they’ll share tools and their experience with implementation and lessons learned. Topics will include an overview of ICS roles and responsibilities for multiple locations, creation of Incident Action Plans, leading a planning session, and use of standardized forms through operational periods. 

C17 – Conducting Global Exercises in a Virtual Environment   

Don Hall and Bryan Stoner, Cisco Systems, Inc.
Cisco’s Customer Experience (formally Cisco Services) organization utilizes an effective, practical approach to conducting virtual business continuity (BC) exercises using limited resources in a global environment. This presentation will share the BC exercise methodologies highlighting exercise scope, formats, and tips for conducting exercises when exercise participants are in multiple geographies. This session will share some of the lessons learned over the past few years to engage participants and keep them engaged throughout the exercise, while identifying opportunities to improve plans and provide training to new team members. This format has proven to be effective at improving business continuity plans and we expanded the program to include essential suppliers in fiscal year 2018.   

E2 – How Agile Techniques and Organizational Best Practices Can be Used to Drive Higher Levels of Organizational Preparedness and Buy In
Gary Cohen, Assurance Software
While many business continuity programs hit the mark quite well in terms of achieving compliance goals, achieving significant improvements in organizational preparedness and greater organizational buy-in has been more elusive, especially with limited budgets and resources. We will discuss how to apply core Agile principles to our business continuity programs to achieve greater organizational buy-in, higher levels of participation, better preparedness, and the creation of a continuous improvement engine. We’ll also delve into how to address the opportunities and challenges of operating in today’s ever changing and globally connected environment with many new tools and technologies at our disposal, but also new challenges to conquer.

F5 – Professional Development is a Priority

Traci O’Neal and Bonnie Canal, DRI International
When it’s your job to protect your organization from absolutely everything, you’ve got  a lot of top priorities. It’s important to make sure that your own professional development is among them. Attend this session for an update on the latest changes and additions to the DRI International Professional Practices for Business Continuity Management and learn what those changes mean for you and your profession. We’ll also cover BCM career development trends and let you know what will help you learn more and earn more.