The ripple effects of the pandemic can feel more like tidal waves. It has defined a moment of our time and permanently altered major aspects of our lives forever. At the same time, continuity and excellence in the service of customers have increasingly become the new standard for success. As a result, there is a new recognition of the importance of building operational resilience into the fabric of organizations.
Risk, continuity, and resilience dominate the agenda for organizations globally. At scale, they require action on the part of many, from the top to the bottom of your enterprise. With the advent of the pandemic, many organizations have faced a broader reckoning that disruption can represent a significant commercial threat. Before 2020, many would disregard possible unexpected disruptions with a “That will never happen to us.” But the reality is, it’s not if something will happen but when. This past year has definitely shown this to be true, which is why now is the time to model your business through the lens of operational resilience – not the crisis.
A good operational resilience program provides protection. A great operational resilience program enables your business strategy with a holistic approach and an integrated system. Understanding your business, how it works, and how it can break enables an entire host of qualitative aspects, including regulatory and compliance benefits, brand and reputation, protection, marketing, and competitive edge, vendor risk management, improvements in organization-wide knowledge, and strategies that are firmly anchored in awareness of current competencies and weaknesses. Knowing your business is a strategic differentiator that allows you to be more prepared and protect your business from a near future that is characterized by uncertainty.
Having an operational resilience program in place not only protects the continuity of your business but also makes you more effective and more efficient. It costs less to block a cyberattack than to deal with ramifications of impact. It costs less to be ready for a flood than to be affected by one unexpectedly. The list goes on. At the end of the day, it’s better to mitigate risks than to take them all on without preparation.
The bottom line (which can quite literally be in terms of financial impact) is that operational resilience is not only imperative for an organization’s overall continuity, but it also provides a competitive advantage. This past year has shown that to be true for everyone. You must find what works for your business to ensure the lights stay on as well as to increase effectiveness and efficiency in the process.
A New Era of Resilience
We are excited to speak further on operational resilience as a Gold Sponsor at DRJ Spring 2021: A New Era of Resilience. Learn more during the keynote session Model Your Business – Not the Crisis! with Mike Campbell and Delroy Ross.
Operational resilience, defined as the ability to prevent, respond to, recover, and learn from operational disruptions, has become the top priority for firms across industries. Having experienced the struggles of pivoting mid-pandemic without complete, reliable data, executives worldwide share a renewed focus on their organization’s resilience measures to improve their agility in decision-making.
While achieving operational resilience is a complex journey, it depends on business continuity as its cornerstone. As risk and resilience leaders, the COVID-19 pandemic offers us a chance to revolutionize how we manage business operations, inform executive decision-making, and enable teams to navigate the frontier of change. To do so, organizations require a robust operational resilience program, built of an integrated range of activities connected to governance, risk management, and compliance.
This keynote led by Fusion Risk Management CEO Mike Campbell and Delroy A. Ross, MBA, CBCP, CISA, Global Business Continuity Officer at CIGNA, discussed the operational resilience journey that firms are facing and outlines what it takes to move from the current state of planning to the north star of coordinating a true resilience strategy.
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