ISO has just strated to draft a management system standard on BCM. Will this be the end of BS 25999?

Normally ISO standards replace national standards when published.

Thats an interesting point Locutus and thanks by the way for being first one in to the discussion board.

The issue of national and internation standards is a complex one and the order of precedence depends where you are. In the UK, a national BS would tend to have preference over a European Norm which would in turn have preference over an ISO standard.

It will be interesting to see where ISO/PAS 22399:2007 which is the one I think you were referring to is going to go and what its relationship with BS25999, NFPA1600 et al going to be.

BS25999 is relatively new but has already established a strong presence in the market and unless we are dealing with manadatory standards, like for example, electrical installation, then it is usually the market that decides.

Once again, welcome to the forum

Thanks for the welcome and response!

According to a recent published article in ISO MS, the committee responsible for ISO/PAS 22399 has also decided to do an additional standard (ISO 22301) which will include requirements such as the BS 25999-2. Well, ISO standards are not mandatory, but who wants to certify against a national standard when there is a global one?
http://www.standard.no/pronorm-3/data/f/0/18/58/9_2401_0/-_ISO_PAS223_provides_international_best_practice.pdf

Thanks for that, hadnt heard of ISO 22301 and mistakenly assumed you meant 22399

The document is an interesting read. As I said though it is often the one with the most presence that wins out, not that it is a competition of course.

Well there is in fact competition, numerous of national standards on the subject and more are coming (Canada, Netherlands). A global company cannot certify against them all so I guess that ISO is getting into the game to solve this confussion once and for all.

If you look at the history of other standards such as ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 these all started life as national (i.e. BS) standards.

If they have just started drafting ISO 22301 it is presumably some years away. I would not be surprised if the next version of BS 25999 is identical with ISO 22301. Anyway as they both address the same issue - business continuity management - and both adopt the PDCA approach I would not expect them to be that different even if they continued to exist independently.