Continuity ensures critical activity carries on as normal during a crisis, writes Barry O'Halloran

Dubliner Ms Karen McEntegart considers herself very lucky. On the day of the World Trade Centre attacks in September 2001, she was due at a meeting in her employer's office in the first tower roughly an hour after the hijacked aircraft struck.

She was in her own office in Jersey City, directly across the river from what subsequently became known as Ground Zero. Her building, the tallest in Jersey, was evacuated in case it too became a target.

The attacks' geo-political implications are well known. But they also had consequences for people like Ms McEntegart's employer at the time, Lehman Brothers, not to mention the woman herself.

She was vice president of business continuity at the Wall Street broker. This meant she was responsible for ensuring that the critical elements of their operations got back up and running with as little interruption as possible.

In Lehman's case, 6,000 workers were displaced, while it had lost 1.4 million square feet of office and data centre space. In Jersey, where its facility was intact, the police initially warned workers they re-entered the building at their own risk, and the company was forced to operate out of a nearby hotel.

"That kind of experience changed our attitude towards business continuity," Ms McEntegart recalls. "Before that it was largely making sure you had the right IT back-ups, the right data back-up and the right telcos. But it really brought to the fore that it's got to be about more than IT.

"It's all about ensuring that the critical parts of your business carry on as normal, or with as little interruption as possible, during a crisis." Lehman re-engineered its business continuity plan so it could focus on what its critical functions were.

The next time a disaster struck, last year's blackout in the north-eastern US, everything went smoothly. This time, Ms McEntegart found herself in a dentist's chair at the other side of Manhattan from Lehman's.

It was almost impossible to communicate via mobile phone, because the networks did not have the capacity to handle everyone trying to contact one another at once, and some of the masts were themselves knocked out. Ms McEntegart and her colleagues relied on their "blackberries", recently introduced devices that provide wireless e-mail contact.

Ms McEntegart has recently taken up a new job as director of business continuity services with Risk Management Ireland (RMI), a 10-year-old company founded by former members of the Defence Forces. Its clients include 40 of the top 100 Irish companies listed in the Irish Times/Businessworld Top 1,000.

The risks (and their implications) facing Irish companies may not be on the scale of 9/11, but they are serious. Ms McEntegart points out that loss of power is a common cause of crises, and it's one that can strike anywhere. She also points out that maintaining a state of preparedness for any form of crisis is now regarded as an integral part of corporate governance, but one that seems neglected here.

She argues that while the Central Bank has conducted "stress tests" to assess the Irish financial system's ability to deal with economic crises (it passed), there's no research into its ability to handle an emergency. "For example, what would be the effect of an event that causes multiple businesses in the International Financial Services Centre to be out for a long period of time?" she asks.

In the wake of September 11th, the US Federal Reserve provided $323 billion in funding to combat what could have been a solvency crisis brought on by the loss of key broker-dealer facilities needed for the government securities market. This, she says, raises the questions about the likely direct and indirect cost of an inability to run the Irish markets in the event of any incident.