[OR] [P2] [S1] [CBS] [C6] Tools and Techniques

Chapter 6 Tools and Techniques

Introduction

Identifying Critical Business Services (CBS) is not a purely theoretical exercise—it requires structured, practical tools and collaborative techniques to ensure accuracy, consistency, and alignment with operational resilience objectives.

The following tools and techniques provide organisations with the means to systematically identify, validate, and refine their CBS, while ensuring alignment with regulatory expectations and business realities.

Workshops and Facilitated Sessions

Workshops are one of the most effective techniques for identifying CBS, as they bring together stakeholders from across the organisation to develop a shared understanding of services and their criticality.

These sessions typically involve representatives from business units, operations, IT, risk management, compliance, and third-party management. A structured facilitation approach ensures that discussions remain focused on outcomes rather than internal processes, reinforcing the service-centric perspective required in operational resilience.

Key benefits include:

Encouraging cross-functional collaboration and breaking down silos
Challenging assumptions about what is “critical.”
Achieving consensus on service definitions and boundaries

Facilitated workshops often use guided templates, predefined criteria, and real-life disruption scenarios to stimulate discussion and ensure consistency in outputs.

Service Mapping Templates

Service mapping templates provide a structured way to define and document each business service from an end-to-end perspective. These templates help organisations clearly articulate how a service is delivered and what resources are required.

A typical service mapping template includes:

Service name and description
Start and end points (customer trigger to outcome delivery)
Key processes involved
Supporting resources (people, technology, facilities)
Third-party dependencies
Upstream and downstream interactions

By standardising service documentation, organisations can ensure consistency across business units and create a solid foundation for subsequent activities, such as dependency mapping and scenario testing.

Business Impact Analysis (BIA) Integration

Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is a well-established component of Business Continuity Management and plays a critical role in CBS identification.

Integrating BIA results allows organisations to leverage existing data on critical processes, recovery priorities, and impact thresholds.

Through BIA integration, organisations can:

Identify services that support critical business functions
Quantify the impact of service disruption (financial, operational, reputational)
Align CBS identification with Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD)

However, it is important to note that BIA traditionally focuses on internal processes, whereas CBS identification requires a shift toward customer-facing outcomes.

Therefore, BIA outputs should be adapted and reinterpreted through a service-centric lens.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is a powerful technique that helps organisations visualise how customers interact with a service across multiple touchpoints. This approach reinforces the principle that CBS should be defined by customer outcomes rather than by internal organisational structures.

By mapping the customer journey, organisations can:

Identify critical moments where service disruption would have the greatest impact
Understand dependencies across channels (e.g., digital, branch, call centre)
Highlight pain points and vulnerabilities in service delivery

This technique is particularly valuable in industries such as banking, telecommunications, and healthcare, where customer experience is closely tied to service continuity.

Scenario Analysis (Severe but Plausible Disruptions)

Scenario analysis involves evaluating how business services would perform under severe but plausible disruption scenarios. This technique is essential for testing whether identified services truly meet the criteria of being “critical.”

Examples of scenarios include:

Cyberattacks affecting core systems
Third-party service provider failure
Natural disasters impacting physical operations
Pandemic or workforce disruption

By applying these scenarios, organisations can:

Validate the criticality of services based on real-world impact
Identify hidden dependencies and vulnerabilities
Refine CBS definitions and prioritisation

Scenario analysis also creates a direct linkage between CBS identification and later stages of operational resilience, such as impact tolerance setting and scenario testing.

The tools and techniques outlined above provide a practical and structured approach to identifying Critical Business Services.

While each tool serves a specific purpose, their true value lies in their combined application—integrating workshops, mapping, analysis, and scenario-based validation into a cohesive methodology.

Ultimately, organisations that effectively leverage these tools will achieve a more accurate, defensible, and regulator-aligned identification of CBS. This, in turn, ensures that operational resilience efforts are focused on what truly matters: maintaining the delivery of critical services to customers and stakeholders under all conditions.

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