Robert Clark was recently appointed by 6pm plc to take on a dual role with the company with responsibility for its business continuity management and also for the 6pm Group’s human resources management. He is no stranger to Malta having spent time here first as a child and then followed by two spells working at MITTS (now called MITA).

Mr Clark has worked in 10 different countries across a variety of industry sectors including financial services, retail, manufacturing, oil exploration and airlines. He has also worked for three central governments – the UK, Italy and Malta.

As a consultant, Mr Clark has spent time with both large corporations as well as small and medium sized enterprises. Some of his clients are household names such as Barclays Bank, Zurich Financial Services, Halifax Bank of Scotland, British Airways, Transport for London and Fujitsu.

It was while working with IBM in the 1970s that he first got involved with business continuity management, or disaster recovery as it was then called. This required testing the ability of companies to recover their large mainframe computers in the event of a disaster. These tests involved the planning and management of local and sometimes international disaster recovery trials.

In his business continuity management role, Mr Clark is responsible for ensuring that 6pm is ready to face a disaster and also to help the company’s clients achieve a state of business continuity readiness.

“People do not realise that it can take just a few seconds for an organisation to go from being highly successful and profitable to being faced by total failure. The vast majority of business threatening incidents are not caused by fires, floods or bombs. They are just ‘quiet catastrophes’ that you will rarely hear about in the media but they can still have a cataclysmic impact on an organisation’s ability to function,” Mr Clark said.

6pm is an established IT solutions company specialising in information management, business intelligence and document management.