William Bedsole

Mr. Bedsole is a recognized expert in the fields of information management, disaster recovery and business continuity planning. During his 25-year career, Mr. Bedsole has personally consulted with hundreds of organizations in both the public and private sectors, and hundreds more through extension of his staffs. This diversity has provided him with an accumulated depth and breadth of experience that is typically impossible to gain from an in-house, corporate environment. His engagements have taken him to every state and province in the U.S. and Canada as well as throughout Europe where he has consulted to executives of small, privately held firms as well as large, multinational Fortune corporations.

Mr. Bedsole has performed and managed all aspects of the information management field from both a vendor and in-house perspective. He has hands-on experience with application development for homegrown products as well as commercial software on both legacy mainframe and MS Windows platforms and has managed all data center “back office” functions including: operations, system software, storage management, logical and physical security, records management, capacity planning, architectural design and network management. He has designed commercial data centers as well as commercial hotsites and has managed their construction through certification, including: physical design, power, HVAC, physical security and construction management. And as a result of running production data centers and commercial outsourcing operations, he has experienced first-hand the need for, and the challenge of providing, world-class customer support and 24 x 7 availability.

In the Business Continuity field, Mr. Bedsole pioneered the current model for commercial hotsites by formalizing new methods and procedures for managing virtual hotsite recovery centers. He personally managed and directed one of the largest recovery facilities in the world and has participated in hundreds of recovery tests and has also supported live, multiple-client disaster recoveries. The combination of his hotsite experience and his extensive consulting background enabled Mr. Bedsole to found Comdisco Consulting Services (CCS) and establish it as the leading specialist in disaster recovery and business continuity planning and related consulting areas. As the first president of CCS, he developed its products and services and expanded the practice into an international organization that became the largest, fastest growing contingency services business in the world. As the creative force and original architect of ComPAS, Mr. Bedsole also pioneered the use of automated systems for business continuity planning and published the most advanced business continuity planning software of its time.

Mr. Bedsole is also the author of the industry’s first formal planning methodology and was the developer of many of the processes and techniques that are still the basis for practitioner certification today. He has formulated strategies to recover small PC-based hardware environments for individual departments as well as complete business environments for organizations with hundreds of locations and dozens of data centers and has architected High Availability solutions that provided his clients true continuity for less than the cost of traditional recoverability. He has authored articles on business continuity planning and information management which have been published internationally and his opinions and views of industry trends have been widely quoted in trade journals as well as in the popular press. He has conducted dozens of public seminars and private training sessions on the subjects of IT disaster recovery, business continuity planning, records management and project management, and has trained international contingency planning staffs on equipment recovery, communications recovery, business recovery, vital records, impact analysis, and many other areas of business continuity.

In 1990, Mr. Bedsole formed the William Travis Group (WTG) to offer corporate America a reliable source for vendor-independent recovery solutions and world-class consulting capabilities combined with a small company’s focus, quality and commitment to service. As the president of WTG, Mr. Bedsole has completed many of the industry’s largest, ground-breaking projects. Most recently, Mr. Bedsole has worked with some of the largest Fortune companies to create a new, all-risk planning methodology specifically designed to address the shortfalls of the disaster recovery-centric methodology he created over 20 years ago and which is still the primary model used by the industry today. WTG’s NextGen 360° Advance Business Continuity® methodology is specifically designed for today’s business climate of cost containment and limited resources and utilizes the lessons of the industry’s first 25 years to take advantage of the latest technical developments and cost efficiencies in system architectures, data replication and anywhere-anywhere communications to provide a much broader focus than either disaster recovery or business continuity. WTG’s NextGen All-Risk Incident Management methodology offers a single, modular communication framework that enables organizations to address any and all risk management issues under a single umbrella as time, budget and focus allows, including: disaster recovery, business continuity, manufacturing continuity, pandemic operations, supply chain continuity, crisis communications, product liability, succession planning or any other topic pertinent to today’s business environment.

Mr. Bedsole provides his clients with a highly valued consulting service, which often becomes an integral part of their total, long-term resources. His hands-on technical experience in system development, data center operations, software design and installation, facilities management and communications combines with his senior management experience in the areas of consulting, training, business procedures and infrastructure to offer clients a unique dual-focus perspective. He has repeatedly enhanced his client’s production and recovery capabilities and has saved them tens of millions of dollars in the process.

Major Accomplishments

• Coined the terms Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and refined their concepts until they became standard terminology across more than a dozen industries and the conceptual basis for all DR/BC requirement definition.
• Designed and developed ComPAS, the disaster recovery industry’s first automated software planning tool and introduced leading edge concepts like integrated recovery timeline tacking, dynamic team/organization plan variants, expert system knowledgebases and others.
• Developed many of the processes and techniques for construction and management of highly leveraged, multi-client shared commercial hotsites which enables the operational and financial practicality of the shared-subscription model to this day.
• Developed the first viable alternative to the industry’s formal Business Impact Analysis (BIA) which produces better results and improved management support with much less overhead and cost.
• Pioneered Manufacturing Continuity planning concepts and techniques which offer the first practical approach for establishing long-term continuity and recovery of large-scale manufacturing equipment, production lines and processes.
• Developed the industry’s first All-Risk Industry Management Methodology which integrates senior management’s oversight with hands-on subject matter expert recovery management of any and all incident responses on a global scale.
• Saved clients tens of millions of dollars on commercial hotsite and workarea contract renewals while formalizing dozens of improved contract terms and conditions that improve recoverability and increase subscription value.
• Pioneered pre-crisis communications planning and developed an integrated, cross-plan communications model that speeds communications ATOD (At Time of Disaster), improves message acceptance and limits additional damage resulting from uncontrolled communication.
• Established a new standard for recovery plan quality and completeness and introduced the concept of event-agnostic, impact-specific, response-proportionate, size-appropriate, multi-threaded and declaration-preemptive plans.
• Pioneered the use “Smart Documents” to automate planning tasks like BIA interviews and eliminate maintenance for other like call lists and team rosters.
• Designed a revolutionary automated TableTop Console to increase flexibility and add realism to tabletop exercises.
• Saved clients millions of dollars on hybrid recovery architectures that leverage in-house resources and reduce cost and improve RTO and RPO capabilities.
• Developed a quick-start planning methodology for small companies that produces a “million dollar plan” from start to finish in less than six weeks.
• Developed CPRTM, a comprehensive Current Preparedness Review assessment tool that systematically compares a company’s current IT procedures, facility infrastructure, geographic exposures and disaster recovery and business continuity methods against best practices for consistent, repeatable program measurement.