Chartwell Launches Business Continuity Leadership Council for Utility Sector

ATLANTA — Chartwell, Inc., a leading provider of utility industry research and peer collaboration focused on customer-facing and operational issues, has announced the formation of the Business Continuity Leadership Council, a new utility-only peer community scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2027.

The council will bring together utility professionals working in business continuity, emergency management, enterprise risk, operations, customer experience, IT disaster recovery, and organizational resilience. Its purpose is to provide a trusted forum for benchmarking practices, sharing lessons learned, and developing practical approaches to sustaining essential utility functions during disruption. The Business Continuity Leadership Council will operate under Chartwell’s Utility Resilience Institute, joining the Emergency Management Leadership Council, the Outage Communications Leadership Council, and the Organizational Resilience Executive Council. This expansion reflects Chartwell’s growing support for utilities seeking to strengthen readiness, response, recovery, and enterprise resilience.

“Utilities are facing a broader and more interconnected risk environment than ever before,” said Victor Fleites, Senior Consultant at Chartwell and a long-time utility veteran, who will lead the council. “Extreme weather, cyber incidents, vendor dependency, workforce constraints, supply chain disruption and heightened expectations from regulators, customers and executives are forcing utilities to think differently about resilience. Business continuity is no longer just a plan on the shelf. It is an operational capability that helps ensure the organization can continue to function when normal conditions are disrupted.”

Chartwell’s recent research and voice-of-customer discussions with utility practitioners indicate that business continuity is emerging as a distinct discipline within the utility industry, even as its boundaries with emergency management, crisis management, IT disaster recovery, and enterprise risk often remain blurred. The new council is designed to help utilities address that gap by focusing specifically on the planning, governance, dependencies, recovery strategies, exercises, and continuous improvement efforts required to keep the enterprise operating through both immediate and long-duration disruptions.

While emergency management focuses on activation and response—protecting people, stabilizing the situation, mobilizing resources, and restoring service—business continuity focuses on planning for the operational gaps that can emerge during and after disruption. In simple terms, emergency management helps utilities respond to an event and “get the lights back on,” while business continuity helps ensure the utility can continue running as a company, including functions such as customer service, billing and payments, payroll, supply chain, regulatory reporting, IT recovery coordination, leadership decision-making, and vendor continuity. Members of the Business Continuity Leadership Council will go beyond reactive response to build enterprise-wide visibility, accountability, and preparedness, aligning investment and resilience decisions. Together, these disciplines form complementary parts of a broader utility resilience strategy.

The new council will help members explore practical questions facing utilities at all levels of program maturity: What does a mature utility business continuity program look like? How should business impact analyses be structured? Who owns continuity across the enterprise? How should utilities map dependencies across systems, vendors, facilities, and people? How should continuity plans be activated and integrated with emergency management, Incident Command System structures, and executive governance? How can organizations move from documentation to tested, usable capability?

Initial content areas are expected to include business continuity and operational resilience definitions, governance and accountability, business impact analysis, risk assessment and dependency mapping, continuity plan structure, IT disaster recovery and cyber resilience, technology and automation, third-party and vendor continuity, workforce continuity, training and exercises, regulatory expectations, metrics and program maturity, lessons learned, and emerging threats.

Like Chartwell’s established leadership councils, the Business Continuity Leadership Council will use a collaborative peer consulting format to bring utility leaders together for confidential peer exchange, member-driven discussions, benchmarking, case studies, practical tools, and shared problem solving. Members will help shape council priorities and content so the forum remains grounded in real-world utility challenges and timely industry needs.

“The goal is not to duplicate the work of emergency management or outage communications,” Fleites said. “Rather, it is to help utilities connect the dots across the enterprise through an all-hazards approach that strengthens organizational resilience. Critical business functions, customer-facing operations, and governance processes must be able to continue during disruptions. By positioning business continuity within Chartwell’s Utility Resilience Institute, we are creating a natural home for the conversations utilities need to have about resilience, from outage communications and executive preparedness to the operational discipline of keeping the business running.”

Chartwell will continue engaging prospective charter members through working sessions, research, webinars, and planning discussions ahead of the official launch. To find out more about the benefits of being a charter member of the new Business Continuity Leadership Council or Chartwell’s Utility Resilience Institute, please email Tim Herrick, Vice President of Sales and Marketing.

About Chartwell, Inc.

Based in Atlanta, Chartwell Inc. is a specialized information provider for the utility industry. The company offers strategic research and facilitates issue-targeted forums for collaboration among industry peers. Its range of services ensures that members have access to timely, high-quality information to support business decisions. For more information, visit www.chartwellinc.com.