A Going Concern, Inc. © 2020

Service Lines

Business Continuity

Technology Risk

Operational Effectiveness

Integrated Security

Digital Memory Preservation

Hot Topics

Frustration Free Continuity

We have been focused on this concept for the past two years and it looks to be paying dividends for our clients.  We are working on a paper to provide some more insights to everyone so keep watching this space.

The changing risks for Healthcare:

It may not be apparent to many of us, but the increased risks with the mandated electronic medical records and the continued increase in dependence on electronic systems to provide our healthcare are changing the face of risk management for organizations.  The integration of disaster recovery plans, operational continuity plans, emergency response plans and data restoration plans must be a priority.  The patient safety and evacuation or disaster preparedness and response (plans focused in most cases on helping other in a disaster) will not provide the needed level of protection or planning for these new risks.  Important questions to ask:

• Can we function without our IT systems? Think Pharmacy, Emergency Department, etc.
• How would we update the EMR after an event to ensure accuracy and patient care continuity?
• If we have multiple sites, our manual procedures may be different, or inconsistent - does this affect our care?
• Do our manual processes enable us to capture all the information needed to be entered in the EMR after the fact?

If you would like to discuss any of these questions in detail, please contact us.

Welcome to our web presence

A Going Concern is a different kind of consulting services firm.  We are focused on the things that matter in business when you want to remain in business even after something goes wrong.  

Our continuity services are targeted to keeping things simplified, yet complex enough to handle all the intricacies that you have within your company.  We have four main cores in our service delivery and you can utilize one or any combination of the four. For those of you in Southern Illinois, we now offer a fifth service - memories preservation.

Customized planning is the only way most business ever develop a continuity program that works in an actual event.  You can visit the Ready.gov website (which we encourage for everyone to use when looking at a personal continuity plan), but it will not provide you all the things your business will need.  You can borrow a template from your friend’s business and it may work very well for that company, but just will not work for yours.  

If you aren’t sure, spend some time with us.  Call or email us and we’ll schedule a 30 minute consultation with one of our consultants.  It is free.  You can ask about planning for disasters, how to help manage risk, the factors that are needed to have a good technology recovery program – whatever is pressing for you.  We’ll provide you with answers, suggestions or a process that should be utilized to get the complete answers needed for your program.

Please, browse the site.  We’ll try and provide updates and new materials frequently.  Contact us.  We can help.

Fred Klapetzky

Fred@agoingconcern.com

Resources that we’ve found to be helpful:

Dr InfoSec:  Christophe Veltos at Minnesota State University in Mankato MN.  He’s building an online Master’s in Information Security and the program looks to be a great one.  If you are interested, see the site at MNSU.edu.  You can contact him at veltos@mnsu.edu.  Follow him on Twitter: @DrInfoSec

What about Ebola?

We had considered not talking about the topic since most of what we are hearing is hype and not focused on reality, but we’ve been asked to comment and we produced a short article for you.  You can get to it here.

How Far Away should my backup site be?

A tough question that is also not as simple as it sounds.  The answer depends on factors of independence.  Teach me more you ask?  Here’s a start.  A new article we just placed on the site.

Trends & Issues in BCP

We have a long history of watching trends and looking at issues to see if there are any planning or process actions that might be useful in countering these issues.  We thought it might be fun to feature our current biggest issues in this space.  If you have a specific issue or trends you think should be added, Send Fred an email.

0. With the Covid 19 issues, the reaction by government and panic induced by media, we expect around 60% of our restaurants to never reopen.  We expect many places that rely on foot traffic to close within 2 years.  The margins with those businesses is not high enough to maintain extended closures.  The issue will be does that result in early retirements of the owners?

1. The aging workforce: There is a lot of company history getting ready or already leaving.  An interesting outcome of all the right sizing companies were going through in the early 2000s is that the entire middle management tier was removed and the experienced managers are not there to fill the vacancies now. Even before Covid, this was an issue, after this time, we expect to see it become a bigger issue.

2. Cloud everything:  Sounds so futuristic and seen as cost saving by the leadership.  It is neither and the true risks of trusting your information to others is yet to be fully experienced. So we will add to this with bandwidth.  We have seen a lot of bad video conferences, glitchy web session, you name it. To keep up the speed, expect less security measures implemented.

3. Political backlash: Whatever political stance you take, you are sure to impact about half your potential audience, yet we see these actions much more frequently than before.  Your plans are not ready for that backlash. Are you willing to lose 50% of your potential business to take a political stand.  We recommend remaining silent on many of these hot buttons.

 Announcing a new service line!

It has been a while since we introduced a new service line.

We’ve had requests from our friends and associates asking if we can help them preserve their memories on VHS take, film, printed photos, 8mm recordings, 8mm film - you get the idea.

Frankly we do have the technology to make this happen and after careful consideration, we said yes.

There is plenty of competition out there, but we decided we’ll start locally.  There isn’t a company in our local area that can offer these services - so we will.  The difference is that your precious memories are not going to be mailed.  You can drop them off with us, or make arrangements for us to pick them up from you.

Pricing is a bit variable depending on quantity and type of service you need.  See our new Memories Preservation tab in the products page.