Roles and Responsibilities in Business Continuity
Who decides and acts during a disruption
A continuity plan without clearly assigned roles becomes a theoretical document nobody knows how to carry out when the real disruption happens. Defining responsibilities means naming, with specific people and designated backups, who declares the activation of the plan, who coordinates internal and external communication, who makes operational decisions in each critical process and who reports the status of the recovery to leadership. This matters in practice because in a crisis there's no time to improvise hierarchies or wait for someone to take the lead on their own initiative. A frequent mistake is assigning responsibility to a single person with no backup, so if that person is on vacation or is precisely the one affected by the incident, as happens when the IT lead is also the victim of a targeted phishing attack, the plan is left with nobody to activate it.