The modern enterprise is absolutely awash in data. However, business continuity managers don’t always consider the role of data and analytics, when they put together their business continuity plans and programs.
Sure, they think of business continuity data protection, focusing on how business continuity resources, like business continuity software, can protect data to prevent business disruption. But data and analytics can play an equally significant role in business continuity planning.
What role exactly? In the following, we lay out the five ways to properly leverage your data and analytics for proactive business continuity planning.
The role of data in business continuity
We’ve all heard the adage knowledge is power. The same goes for data.
Data can enable informed decision-making. And in business continuity, in particular, large data pools can give business leaders line of sight into their entire operations, whether it’s potential risks, resources, and recovery strategies.
Data is often missing from proactive business continuity
It’s this line of sight that’s often missing.
Consider supply chains, specifically. It’s often reported that visibility barriers exist within supply chain processes and between company silos, applications, suppliers, and customers.
In fact, a McKinsey survey found that a staggering 45% of businesses have limited supply chain visibility. That’s not going to get the job done.
Ways to leverage data and analytics for proactive business continuity planning
But while data is plentiful, the right data isn’t always easy to find. And so, to leverage data and analytics for proactive business continuity planning, organizations must first effectively analyze and interpret their information to derive actionable insights.
Ultimately, though, these are the ways data and analytics will help:
Improve risk assessments
The strategies that populate most business continuity plans (BCPs) come from risks identified in the business impact analysis (BIA) and risk assessment (RA).
Data, however, can improve the quality of BIAs and RAs. Organizations, however, must first get into the habit of analyzing their historical data, industry reports, and real-time information to pinpoint vulnerabilities. By deploying data analytics to identify and assess risks, organizations can develop more targeted and effective business continuity strategies.
Forecast future disruptions
Once risks are identified, though, organizations must develop response strategies. Here, data can enrich how businesses conduct scenarios to test their BC strategies.
For instance, after organizations create simulations of potential disruptions, advanced analytics can help model different variables, such as recovery times and resource availability.
What’s more, predictive analytics – the use of data to predict future trends and events – can help organizations forecast future disruptions based on their historical trend data.
Optimize resources
BC strategies often revolve around where resources will go to prevent disruption or in times of disruption. Data analytics can help, here, too, by enabling organizations to better optimize how they allocate their resources.
How exactly? For starters, by looking at inventory levels, demand forecasts, and supply chain data, organizations can finally add visibility into their supply chains, thereby ensuring they maintain sufficient stocks of critical resources to prevent shortages during disruptions. The same logic applies to workforce planning to ensure key personnel are available during crises.
Ensure continuous improvement
BC planning requires ongoing monitoring and optimizations based on lessons learned.
To this end, collecting feedback and performance data after disruptions can provide valuable insights into what worked and what didn’t. This information can then be used to refine BCP strategies and improve future responses.
What’s more, organizations can compare their performance against industry standards or competitors, identifying areas for improvement in their business continuity planning.
Enhance communication and collaboration
Communication is one of the cornerstones of effective business continuity, particularly during disruptions when collaboration is essential.
Implementing data management platforms can ensure that all stakeholders have access to relevant information during a crisis, allowing for more coordinated responses.
Meanwhile, data visualization tools can also help present complex information in an easily understandable format, enabling quicker decision-making during high-pressure situations.
Improving data hygiene to leverage data and analytics for proactive business continuity
A company’s data can be its superpower, but it can also be its kryptonite if that data isn’t handled correctly.
Before leveraging data and analytics, organizations need to get serious about improving their data hygiene. Their data what?
Data hygiene is essentially the process of getting rid of dirty data. Dirty data, for its part, can manifest as duplicate data, inaccurate data, or outdated data.
Data hygiene entails continuously eliminating dirty data to keep your database clean.
Some strategies for keeping dirty data at bay include:
- Perform an audit: Complete an audit of your systems. During the audit, evaluate all the systems your company uses. When assessing each system, you should determine which data sets are necessary for your business and which ones are not. It’s also recommended to map out data dependencies, so you know which systems will be impacted by a change.
- Prioritize valuable data: Data is valuable, but not all data is created equal. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data you have. Therefore, when cleaning out your data, start with the data that’s most important to your business.
- Create a clean data culture: Data hygiene isn’t a one-time practice, either. Indeed, key to data hygiene is repeatability. It’s easier to create a data-first culture if you’ve created a clean data culture by assigning a senior leader ownership of data hygiene.
Finally, many companies are making the leap to become data first. However, some of their business continuity programs are getting left behind. Too many programs view data and analytics through the exclusive lens of business continuity data protection.
As a result, we’ve laid out five ways to leverage data and analytics for proactive business continuity.
But how are cutting-edge BC solutions leveraging data and analytics as we speak?
Well, solutions like Noggin consolidate your data to give you valuable insights and powerful visuals through interactive dashboards. This capability enables a proactive approach to managing business continuity processes and helps you uncover valuable insights for continuous improvement.
But don’t just take our word for it. Request a demonstration to see Noggin in action for yourself.
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)