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Podcast Transcript: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning with James Lee Witt

The National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration predicts an active hurricane season this year. CSO talks with James Lee Witt, CEO of James Lee Witt and Associates and former FEMA director, under President Clinton. The renowned disaster management expert (he oversaw more than 350 disasters during his FEMA tenure) speaks with CSO about how businesses should prepare for hurricanes and other disasters, and tells why no company can afford to be without a business continuity plan.

By Paul Kerstein

June 29, 2006 — CSO — Diann Daniel: Hello and welcome to Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning, a conversation with James Lee Witt. I’m your host, Diann Daniel, Senior Copy Editor at CSO Magazine. Hurricane season began June 1st and runs through November 30th, and the NOAA predicts a very active season. I spoke with Witt about how businesses should prepare for hurricanes and other disasters, and whether anyone’s exempt from planning. Witt has over 25 years of disaster management experience, and was appointed Director of FEMA in 1993 by President Clinton. He served as Director until 2001. Witt is currently CEO and Chairman of James Lee Witt Associates, where he provides disaster recovery and mitigation management services to states and local governments, educational institutions, the international community, and corporations.

Diann Daniel: Hurricane season is upon us, and I’m curious what business executives and particularly security executives should be doing to prepare.

James Lee Witt: The first thing I would recommend doing is to make sure that you have the insurance coverage that you need, whether it’s for wind or whether it’s flood insurance if your business is in a 100-year flood plain. Second, I would make sure that every single employee within my business understood that if we had to evacuate, where would we go, where would we reconvene our business so that we could continue to operate. Then, make sure that I had the capability to send out alert notifications or warnings to all my employees, particularly if it was on a weekend or if employees were traveling, and with a message of what was going on, what they needed to do.

What would you propose that system would be?

There’s several different systems out there. I would look at the one that would not only potentially give voice data but also information data. A lot of times you can do it through a software program on your computer. Some programs you could do it over cell phones. I would look at the different technologies that suited my company the best and work on that. We tend to forget that every dollar we invest in prevention or preparedness could potentially save you three to five dollars in future losses, but the business interruption side of it, it could be even higher than that. I would also check with any of my suppliers that would be in a position of not being able to make those deliver

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