Disaster Recovery – The Process Management Perspective

Process management is becoming increasingly important for managing commercial, governmental as well as non-profit (NGOs) organisations. Process management approaches depend on the process characteristics and requirements, typically determined by the organisational context, both internal and external. Managing processes crossing the NGOs, Government and business agencies brings upon brand new challenges. Our research focuses on disaster recovery, as a prime example of such a complex cross-organisational environment. Eventhough every disaster is unique, when considered from the process perspective, disaster recovery could be seen as a set of operational processes – some of which are highly structured and predefined, while the others are highly emergent, ad-hoc processes that need to be designed in-situ and managed asthey evolve. Through an in-depth review of the relevant literature published by the Business Process Management (BPM) and disaster recovery (DR) research communities this paper reports on the existing research on the process management perspective of disaster recovery. The literature was analysed through a theoretical lens combining two existing frameworks previously developed for a formal organisational context. Our research provides insights into the main characteristics of the operational processes and suggests that their management should consider the so-called “Integration Model” and “Collaboration model” as the most suitable.