An update from the BCI Australasian Chapter regarding the AS/NZS 5050 standard
On behalf of the BCI’s Australasian Chapter, we are releasing the following update regarding changes to the AS/NZS 5050 standard.
When ISO 22301 was adopted in Australia in 2020, the BCI’s Australia Chapter raised concerns to Standards Australia (SA) that the existence of two different standards for Business Continuity (i.e. AS 5050 and AS IS0 22301) will create confusion in the Australian domain. In response, SA directed the Technical Committee responsible for risk-related standards (named ‘OB-007’) to revise AS 5050 by removing all references to Business Continuity. OB-007 complied and rewrote AS 5050 to be a risk standard focused on disruption-related risk.
However, the Chapter felt that retaining the designation 5050, even though the standard had been rewritten, would still create confusion for those who have always known 5050 to be about Business Continuity. As such, on the 23 October 2022, the Chapter submitted a request to SA to re-designate 5050 to a new number.
This request was later referred to OB-007, who decided that they wanted to retain the numbering for the rewritten standard, even though there was no connection between the old and re-written versions.
The re-designation matter was later raised to the SA leadership team who confirmed that SA cannot change the designation of an “already published standard”. Although, SA directed OB-007 to include a preface in 5050:2020 to explain the changes.
Therefore, following this, OB-007 have now endorsed the decision to update the preface of AS/NZS 5050 with the changes passed onto the SA publishing team for review/validation. The Chapter representative on the Technical Committee responsible for Business Continuity and Resilience standards (‘MB-025’) also reviewed the preface and acknowledged that 5050 and the preface has a focus on disruption-related risk.
In summary, OB-007 endorsed their rewritten AS/NZS 5050 which now includes a preface explaining that it is not a Business Continuity standard. The standard is expected to be published in June 2023.
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