Operation Resilience: your mission if you chose to accept it! ... this message will self destruct in 5...4...3...

Author: Lee Edge

Over the last few months we have had clients and prospects asking about Operational Resilience and what it means to me, SAI and them?

• “do you have a dashboard that shows how resilient we are?”
• “can you help me prepare to present our resiliency to the executive management team?”
• What does it mean to be resilient?

Most companies have started to make the taxonomy transition to ‘Operational Resilience’ and have read the BoE paper. I thought I would share some responses I provided, as I thought they may be of use:

• There’s no one answer
• It’s not one data point or factor
• It means different things to different people, and it has different context to different vertical markets and company types
• But… a company / the client needs to put a stake in the ground and decide what it means to them, and BCM is at the heart of it
• To me, it’s a combination of factors that a company can use to decide if they are or are not resilient
• Being resilient is not an end-game, it’s a journey

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Clients need to develop a framework for resiliency and be able to articulate their resiliency factors. We have a dedicated global advisory team who are able to assist in development if/when required, but the key questions we always cover during initial meetings are:
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• Are your BIAs up to date?
• Are your Process models up to date?
• Are your BIA scores going up or down? Greater or lesser impact to the business from BIA to BIA?
• Are your Tests/Exercises improving or getting worse?
• Does your BC Steering committee meet regularly, make decisions, and make progress on initiatives?
• Do you have risk metrics you measure your BCM program against?
• From the last 12 months of real incidents, how did you DO?
• Are you training new hires in BC and Crisis?
• Are you re-training them annually?
• Do you have a critical communications tool and do people use it?

This is not necessarily about the software, it’s bigger. Yes, you want to be able to answer these questions in a tool – the executive dashboard approach of Resiliency Metrics and use of a solution will help. But it is much more about the culture surrounding the software and the engagement across business and IT functions.