New Perspectives – In More Ways than One!
Just like every other aspect of life, Solutions, Fusion’s annual client success summit, had to adjust in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Unable to host our clients for an in-person event in Chicago, we pivoted to deliver the experience virtually. And, what an experience it turned out to be! While there may have been some significant changes to the programming, Solutions20 still delivered on its premise – helping our clients lead a more resilient world.
Having to condense over sixty hours of content across seven tracks into four hours each day certainly presented a challenge. The summit committee worked tirelessly to curate an agenda focused on tangible takeaways and actionable next steps to improve attendees’ risk and continuity programs. Our presenters needed a north star, so we aligned to the future of our strategic vision: operational resilience.
Solutions20 kicked off with an inspirational opening from Chief Executive Officer, Mike Campbell. During the keynote, Mike shared perspectives from his journey with Fusion, outlining the growth strategy implemented following the company’s entry into the Vista Equity Group portfolio, as well as the steps necessary to successfully pivot after COVID-19 grew into a pandemic. Guided by improvements in structure and communication, Fusion welcomed sixty-three new clients, expanded the user engagement program, launched a Customer Success team, and hired eighty-three new employees – all since June 2019! All heralds of the company’s relentless focus on our clients’ success.
Mike then described why operational resilience is the guiding light for how attendees should structure their programs for the future. The danger of thinking and acting in silos. The benefit of thinking collectively and acting collaboratively. And, the opportunity presented by COVID-19 to solidify executive buy-in for operational resilience and the new value demonstrated from programs that adapt. When operational resilience programs are powered by Fusion, clients ensure they deliver on the commitments that matter most – continuing to reliably deliver products and services to their markets and adapting to new business and operating models.
Mike left the audience with a few guidelines for how to maximize their virtual experience: focus on uncovering new ideas, building new relationships, and overall finding new ways to bring innovation and excitement to their programs.
The content that followed was no less exciting and valuable. Five sessions curated to demonstrate the best that Fusion can offer in business continuity, disaster recovery services, third-party risk management, operational risk, and crisis management. Steve Greenstein, David Halford, Katie Robilotta, Alex Toews, and Alex Ostrovsky respectively outlined how each of the areas facilitate effective and agile operational resilience. With live demonstrations to support their points, clients continuously commented on how valuable the virtual summit was turning out to be:
“This is exactly the level I’ve been looking for [with] ITDR!”
“Please drop into the weeds more often!”
“ALEX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Wooooooo!”
“HUGE THANK YOU FUSION – Great ideas.”
Solutions20 didn’t stop at breakout content. Chief Technology Officer Cory Cowgil, SVP of Strategic Engagement Steve Richardson, and new Chief Product Officer, Brian Molk kicked off day two of the summit by outlining the product enhancements over the last year and what clients can expect in the coming year during their product vision and roadmap keynote session. 2019 innovations included key developments around risks, controls, and organizational taxonomies; new features for third-party management, the Fusion Connector for Everbridge Risk Intelligence, and new automation functionality within incident management. Not to mention the multitude of resources in the pandemic and resilience toolkits their teams stood up in a matter of days to help communities respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. With sample plan templates, reopening checklists, and multitude of reliable resources, the toolkits – built on the same platform as Fusion – showed how quickly organizations can adapt to any situation.
On the subject of platforms and adaptation, our three product leaders also dove into Fusion’s latest innovation: Resilience Essentials for Work.com – a solution that extends the power of Salesforce’s Work.com suite of products to the Fusion Framework System. As companies plan their return-to-work strategies, it’s critical for them to understand how to reopen their sites safely. By enhancing the Work.com Command Center with the rich operational data managed in Fusion, clients can prioritize their reopening based on critical business processes and monitor ongoing risk and safety and successfully navigate the “next normal.”
The keynote closed by giving clients a look ahead at what the future holds from the product teams. Guided workflows to streamline end-user engagement with the platform and ensure data accuracy, improved data visualization for upstream and downstream analysis, standardized risk register and control framework content, new data integrations, and a relentless focus on enterprise-wide engagement and visibility. There are certainly some exciting developments coming from the product teams before Solutions21.
Day two wrapped up with an inspiration panel of Fusion experts discussing how attendees can deliver resilience to their C-suites. Moderated by SVP of Customer Success Tracey Rice, the panel focused on two key themes: transformation and connection.
SVP and Co-founder Bob Sibik explained how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and a reliance on technology to perform work, offering advice on how to leverage data to proactively understand process changes and associated risks.
Principal of Financial Services Rich Cooper shared how while operational resilience has been the regulatory norm for global financial institutions for some time, the standard is now spreading to every industry. By understanding how your company works, you can understand how it might break, how to protect it, and – consequently – how to reduce disruption to the interconnected markets that depend on your services, whether it be access to capital, access to healthcare, or dependability of infrastructure.
Senior Director of Customer Success Ramya Ragavan shared inspiring stories of clients gaining new visibility and responsibility from their executives. From tech CEOs standing up global strike teams to speed the integration of their resilience teams, to the program manager for a multinational medical and healthcare company meeting with their CEO weekly to discuss the progress of their resilience steering committee, Ramya provided example after example of clients embracing their ability to strengthen the data-driven decision-making of their executives.
Tracey Rice closed out the panel with a challenge to the attendees: with all the opportunity presented to resilience programs, who would return to next year’s summit as their company’s first Chief Resilience Officer? Whoever they may be, they’d get to celebrate their accomplishments in a new city for Solutions21! Our fifth annual summit will be hosted at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in sunny Orlando, Florida on June 6 – 9. We’re excited to bring the experience to a new venue and can’t wait to see all of our clients next year.
The summit presentations weren’t the only things that went virtual. We also found a way to shift our client celebration to an online concert! After Fusion closed our offices, we started a weekly tradition – Fusion Live! To close each week, employees join a company-wide Zoom meeting to enjoy the sweet sounds of Jeff Mills and Chris Arwady, two Fusion musicians that formed an impromptu virtual band, The Quarantainers. And what better way to cap off the virtual summit than to invite all our clients to join us in our happy place, BYO cocktail.
Thank you to all of the clients that joined us for Solutions20 and we can’t wait to see everyone again for our fifth annual summit in Orlando!
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