Business continuity is a difficult challenge for most businesses. The typical approach to creating business continuation plans is to generate a large document which outlines key actions to be taken in the event of business disruption. The problem with this approach is that the resulting document is quickly outdated, rarely reviewed, and less frequently put into practice. Active Agenda helps companies build business continuity into the day-to-day business process.

Business Continuity Module: The business continuity module allows organizations to assign business continuity responsibilities to people inside and outside the organization in advance of disruption. The assignments can be viewed centrally to assess plan status, make personnel reassignments, track the currency of supporting contract agreements and share plan designs and currency with insurance carrier underwriters bidding on a company's business interruption coverage.

Continuity of Design: Active Agenda uses the same user interface to navigate its more than fifty business risk control modules. This consistent design means that organizations can train a person to use Active Agenda using one module and that learning translates to all the rest. In fact, using the application is the best way to train-the-trainer. Active Agenda's domain approach of integrating multiple business functions within a single risk control system means that employees working with Active Agenda can become resources across the global enterprise, reducing the disruption caused by the loss of key knowledge resources.

Functional Continuity Via Systems Integration: Integration is at the core of Active Agenda's design. Integration leads to open sharing and open sharing eliminates the hoarding of key operational knowledge and history. Active Agenda uses single, integrated systems to manage disparate risks. This method of risk administration significantly reduces the risks posed by the loss of any one person, or controls imposed by any one department, and ensures that companies can objectively manage without interruption. Active Agenda also maintains an audit trail of every change made to every record, thereby making it possible to "reset" the database to any point in time (e.g. before a mass delete).

No More “Program of the Month”: We have inherited risk management programs from predecessors many times. Without exception, our jobs required the reassembly of information, programs, processes, data, files, and other forms of documentation, knowledge and/or history that had been misplaced or lost forever. On average, an incumbent risk manager can spend six months or more rebuilding the risk management knowledge base of an organization and reestablishing programs. This process always invokes frustration from operating locations which get introduced to the next “program of the month” just when they were finding a way to “tolerate” the last one. In addition to new programs, policies, and practices ushered in by the incumbent risk manager, there are many projects and commitments abandoned when a risk manager departs. Every time a person is associated with an accountability within Active Agenda, the accountability is saved to a central database where the accountabilities can be retrieved, reviewed, and reassigned on a person-by-person basis or as a global reassignment.

Freedom: Risk control programs are particularly susceptible to market controls imposed by the insurance and risk financing industries. Most insurance carriers and brokers claim ownership to an organization's data and make it very difficult to “disengage” from one of these institutions if an organization becomes dependent upon proprietary systems bundled with the insurance transaction. If an organization can disengage from the relationship, the data remains the property of the vendor and this makes the creation of single contiguous data history nearly impossible to create. Independent software vendors can also make system customization and/or migration costly or impossible to accomplish. Active Agenda is open source and allows users to download and modify the source code in accordance with the Reciprocal Public License. This means that companies can virtually eliminate the dependencies and discontinuity created by proprietary software systems. With Active Agenda, companies are FREE to utilize any service vendor they prefer to make technical modifications and/or assist with strategic implementations of the system. Active Agenda makes data and business continuity part of the business process.