What is Operational Resilience and Why is it Important?
We’ve talked a lot about Operational resilience, a big topic for companies today. Enterprises are undoubtedly facing mounting pressure from shareholders, employees, government regulators, and others to build more resilience and produce predictable business outcomes. That’s not a surprise because of the frequent and complex challenges we have faced over the past few years. Organizations, big and small, are starting to realize it’s not enough to just respond to and survive catastrophic events. Businesses need to adopt risk and impact intelligence to monitor and recognize potential threats and disruptive events before they happen and prepare themselves ahead of time and ahead of their competitors to protect their assets, people, and productivity.
What is Operational Resilience?
Simply put, operational resilience is an organization’s ability to “resist, absorb, and recover from, or adapt to an adverse occurrence” (U.S. Department of Commerce) that could negatively impact its ability to perform its operational functions. More specifically, operational resilience is a level of business preparedness and operational readiness that enables your organization to preempt and avoid the most significant implications of potential disruptions.
Operational resilience is a whole organization undertaking. It
is built from careful examination of business processes and practices across the organization to identify vulnerabilities and then creating new ways of doing things that are more resistant to disruption from external events. Each functional area is important, including finance, operations, procurement, etc. To do this managers need to find ways to identify potential disruptions before they occur and have predefined contingency plans ready and their staff trained to implement them when needed.
How to Achieve Operational Resilience
Over the next few blog posts, we’ll cover different hazard types and how to prepare your company’s employees and assets to ensure their safety and keep our business resilient and running when disaster strikes. In the meantime, to learn more about operational resilience and why it’s essential to adopt a risk and impact intelligence solution for your business, check out our white paper on the subject. This white paper will aid you and your business to better equip yourselves for what you may need to do to improve your organization’s operational resilience, understand the role risk and impact intelligence plays in building operational resilience, and how to evaluate potential solutions.
You can also try out the only risk and impact intelligence solution that offers near-real-time data, risk and impact analysis powered by our Resilience Engine, and the accuracy of over 350 trusted data sources by signing up for a 14-Day Trial.
