Singapore's TR19 BCM standard: in intensive care, prognosis dire

In the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Framework for Voluntary Preparedness report of January 2008, the authors refer to Singapore's Technical Reference for Business Continuity Management (TR19) as an "authoritative source" for "best practices" (see page 4).

That's ironic, because among professionals here in Singapore, TR19 has been mostly a source of derision since its release in 2005.

The marketing of TR19 has been catastrophically inept. The target market for TR 19 was apparently local manufacturers and SME's; neither have paid attention to BCP anywhere else in the world, and they haven't in Singapore, either. TR19's promoters, local standards body Spring Singapore and industry group Singapore Business Federation (SBF), bickered for years over who should bear the responsibility to promote the standard--so neither of them did.

Outreach to individuals likely to be interested if not supportive, such as local consultants and practitioners (other than those who wrote it) was, in my personal experience, half-hearted tending toward hostile. When consultants were contacted, it was to get us to work for free to draft audit guidelines for TR19--without support, facilities or coordination of any kind. We failed miserably.

As if business continuity did not already have enough jargon and acronyms, TR19 introduced another--Minimum Business Continuity Objectives (MBCO)--a term still used nowhere else in the world. (To be fair, British standard BS25999 introduced "Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption" (MTPD), another mind-bender destined for the verbal scrap heap, as well.)

Until last year, TR19 was available only as a printed booklet. It can now be downloaded as a file, but like the booklet, it costs forty Singapore bucks (US$30), plus tax.

Then TR19 was swamped by a British marketing tsunami for BS25999, the current global consensus choice for a standard which, unlike TR19, includes an implementation guide (Part 2) and is supported by the British Business Continuity Institute's (BCI) ubiquitous and free Good Practice Guidelines.

Looking ahead, I suspect TR19 will be drowned by a tide of voluntary preparedness initiatives from North America in the wake of the 9-11 Commission report that resulted in the HR 1 legislation.

The "first company in the world to be independently assessed and certified" to TR19 by Underwriters Laboratories was, in fact, an Indian company in 2006 - before audit guidelines for TR 19 had even been drafted. As far as I know, they are not just the first company, they are the only company. Three years after TR19's launch, there are no companies in Singapore certified to comply with the standard.

If TR19 had been a patient, the prognosis would have been terminal.

That is, until Singapore Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security Shunmugam Jayakumar administered electroshock therapy in this May 2008 speech: "The Government... may even make it mandatory for firms supplying essential or important services to the government to obtain TR19 or equivalent standards." You could almost hear him thinking: "Now do I have your attention?"

So you can expect majority government-owned SingTel and Singapore Power to adopt TR19 as their standard. You could say that TR19 has been moved to intensive care.

Someone must have decided that surgery was required because now TR19 is "under revision". I'd guess any changes will make it easier to understand how to implement TR 19 using the Deming Cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act, or PDCA), the standard methodology for process improvement in manufacturing (think: ISO 9001).

Spring is seeking public comment on the draft. You have until Aug. 7 to submit your comments here.

But Spring is making the draft available only in print, you have to go to the printer (in Singapore) to get it or see it, and it costs S$6 (US$4.50). I went down and bought one: it's the full, forty dollar version of TR 19, reproduced with the words "Draft for public comment" watermarked across every page. Why can't that version be available for download?

What organization would charge six bucks for a document on which it really wanted public comment? Or would, with a straight face, offer the alternative of "free viewing" of a 56-page document--if you'll just go to the printer's office between 9:30am and 6:00pm, Monday through Friday?

Spring says (see page 2): "A nominal price...is charged for copyright and administrative reasons." I'll bet there were lawyers involved here...

As I say, the marketing would be laughable if it weren't so lamentable. This is why Procter & Gamble doesn't put lawyers and scientists in charge of marketing its products.

Prescription
If I were the doctor in charge of emergency triage for TR19, I'd order these treatments:

1. Fix the marketing. As they say in the medical business, stat ! Give the TR19 document away to anyone who'll read it. Put a full copy--not just the table of contents--on Spring's Web site. Optimize the URL for search engines so that it comes up first in a search for "TR19". (Type "TR 19" into a search engine. "The Ceramics of Tikal" came up first for me, followed by the "chemical resistance of thermoplastics piping materials". Only three of the first 10 results were about business continuity.)

State the benefits of TR19 in clear, simple bullets. Why is TR19 better than BS25999 or NFPA 1600? How will my company benefit from being TR19-certified? List three benefits that other standards don't offer. Make a brochure for TR 19 of no more than two pages that can be understood by anyone. Distribute the brochure massively online, and give away printed copies at every industry trade show, conference, seminar, workshop, tea talk and fire drill in Asia, North America and Europe. Talk it up. Where I learned to sell, the first rule was: 'Buy the first round of drinks.'

2. Get a success story and promote the heck out of it. I'd choose a big Singapore bank and encourage--no, beg--them to announce publicly that they plan to be TR19-certified. Banks understand BCP. If you can't get a Singapore bank to support a Singapore BCP standard, there's something wrong with the standard. A telephone company, a power company and a wafer fab plant in Singapore don't count: they make stratospheric investments in plant & equipment and therefore can't be considered business role models, at least not by SME's. Certification of an outsourcing backroom in Bangalore, India doesn't count, either.

3. Evangelize the professionals. If you can't convince people who do BCP for a living, you're not likely to convince anyone else. Are there 50,000 full-time, serious BCM professionals in the world, counting MBCIs, CBCPs, CEMs, CISSPs, and holders of other professional credentials even vaguely related to BCP? Maybe. They are the market, because they can move opinions. I'd concentrate on them, and try to get them to do the selling to industry.

The patient may yet get out of intensive care, but at the moment, my prognosis is that he'll leave feet first.

A footnote: In my opinion, Singapore will never be able to repay Daniel Steele, senior director of Facilities & Environmental Health & Safety at industrial behemoth Chartered Semiconductor and chairman of the committee that developed TR 19, for his efforts to bring it to life. He contributed literally years of work and much of the intellectual capital embodied in TR19. Dan preached faith to unbelievers, cajoled the recalcitrant, comforted the discouraged and generally did heroic heavy lifting, performing "national service" for his adopted country. If they give medals for bravery in the face of withering indifference, he should get a big one.

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Nathaniel Forbes

Nathaniel Forbes is the director of Forbes Calamity Prevention, a Singapore-based consulting firm providing business continuity, crisis management and emergency response advice and training to multinational companies, with a focus on companies with offices in Asia. The firm is 10 years old. FCP's current and past clients include Singapore Exchange Ltd, OCBC Bank, AXA Insurance, The Gillette Company, Siemens and ABN Amro Bank. A former President of the Singapore Computer Society’s Business Continuity Group, Nathaniel passed the DRII’s Certified Business Continuity Planner (CBCP) examination in 1997. He has lived, traveled or worked in Asia since 1973.