The Noggin Blog

So, what is operational resilience?

At its most basic, operational resilience is simply your business’ ability to adapt to (remain resilient during) times of uncertainty and stress.

Operational resilience initiatives expand upon the traditional complement of business continuity management programs, focusing on the impacts, connected risk appetite, and tolerance levels for disruption of product or service delivery to internal and external stakeholders. Sounds pretty prosaic when you put it like that. So, why are regulators interested? 

The reopening of the world’s economies from COVID-19-induced shutdown is happening at different paces. It continues apace in some areas that have contained community spread. In others, the emergence of new hot zones has caused a fresh wave of mandated business closures. Suffice it to say: after months of disruption, businesses are understandably eager to go back to normal as part of the recovery process. The question remains, though, have those businesses prepared themselves to resume operations at pre-crisis levels, especially in a public health environment marked by uncertainty?

In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, business continuity plans (BCPs), processes, and programs have never been in greater demand. But we’ve been here before.

Both the 11 September 2001 terror attacks and late 2000’s financial crisis spurred similar upticks in the popularity of business continuity management systems (BCMS). And yet, by the time COVID-19 came along, an alarming number of companies were unprepared.

Why didn’t business continuity management take off before; and how can you build a sustainable program today?

Early numbers from the COVID-19 response reveal long-simmering challenges in ensuring business continuity for most organizations. In one employer survey, only 37 percent of respondents said that they had the right technology in place for employees to conduct critical business operations from home in the event of an emergency. 

Practical business continuity software solution to provide organizations with the tools needed to effectively assess business risks and impact, coordinate responses to disruptions, and manage incidents, from the smallest outage to a major crisis.

If you didn’t know before, a mainstay of business continuity management is the business continuity plan (BCP), a collection of resources, actions, procedures, and information, designed to prepare organizations to maintain essential functions in the event of a major disruption like the coronavirus pandemic.

For those of us that had forgotten, the outbreak and spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) to multiple continents should remind us that the risk of a critical global health incident must be factored into crisis and business continuity planning – and not just for companies with exposed supply chains.

Beyond business continuity planning, the need to move to a business continuity management system

As a practice, Business Continuity Management aims to maintain essential functions in the event of a disaster or other, major disruption. Organizations get that. After all, they’ve poured time and money into developing business continuity management plans.

Take a look at the figures. Eighteen percent of all violent crimes occur in the workplace. Victim deaths are especially high in retail.

Year after year, the likelihood of a business-destroying critical event only seems to increase. Yet somehow, business continuity planning–the collection of resources, actions, procedures, and information, designed to prepare organizations to maintain essential functions in the event of a disaster or other major disruption–hasn’t made it to the top rung of C-suite priorities. 

Business continuity management (BCM) has been around for some time now, roughly since the 1970s, according to most accounts. Back then, the field was a mere offshoot of crisis management. But now its scope has narrowed substantially to a holistic management process for identifying potential threats to an organization and the operational impacts those threats pose.

The business disaster data suggests yes – emphatically yes.

Organizations underestimate the emergency disaster threat to business viability at their peril. According to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, anywhere between 40 to 60 percent of small businesses never reopen following a national disaster.

Somewhere between “Draft 2” and “Draft 73,” it can be easy to lose control over your all-important report. It can happen as a result of having many hands in the cookie jar: multiple edits, deletions, insertions or course-corrections.

Without a proper version control system in place, and the right tools to help you keep track of changes to a document, you’ll get lost in the Bermuda Triangle of document management, potentially spending more time trying to tell the documents apart than was spent to create the original in the first place.