Most organizations include their business units in their testing efforts. But usually, their role is to enter transactions to validate connectivity and systems recovery. This is certainly an important part of testing, but it does nothing to train your end users on their real roles at time of disaster: “bridging”, lost data re-capture and catch-up.

Most end users don’t need to test to know how to use their applications to conduct business. They need to test how to conduct business without their applications. They must be able to “Bridge” their processes while their applications are being restored…that is to stockpile work initiators, re-route work, relocate people or manually perform their functions as appropriate. They must be able to recollect any lost paper vita records and re-input any lost electronic records. And they must be able to effectively catch-up after a period of interruption.

WTG will work directly with your business units to ensure that they have procedures for each of these three responsibilities and conduct testing exercises to ensure that the procedures are effective and dovetail with the disaster recovery capability.