Resilience enables organizations to survive and thrive in a changing environment: this is the conclusion from a new white paper from the Business Continuity Institute. ‘Resilience is your competitive advantage,’ states that resilience enables faster recovery and response which minimizes personal, financial, and reputational losses associated with an incident; it is also a strategic and commercial imperative that can improve long-term competitive advantage in the digital economy
The key points from the white paper are:
- The interconnected and networked nature of risks impact upon the complexity, range and cost of planned and unplanned business disruptions. Resilience is necessary to survive – and more importantly, thrive – amidst disruption.
- Resilience demands the capability to respond to changes quickly and decisively. This should be backed up by an understanding of the organization, which can be achieved through relevant
information gathering. Resilience ultimately improves decision-making, avoids ad hoc judgments and provides better outcomes. - Resilience, in many situations, requires faster response and recovery. This can be achieved by joining up the efforts of relevant management disciplines (e.g. business continuity, risk management, physical security, cyber/information security, IT disaster recovery, supply chain and logistics, etc.). this translates to avoiding and reducing personal, financial, and reputational loss associated with disruption, enabling an organization to get back on its feet more quickly.
- Resilience positively impacts on an organization’s duty of care and maintains its reputation. With regulatory compliance increasingly focusing on duty of care, building resilience enables organizations to fulfil this obligation and maintain their reputation.
- Resilience is a ‘digital business enabler’ and can be turned into your organization’s competitive advantage if properly understood, and its challenges are met. it nonetheless requires strong leadership and a readiness to drive change ‘from the boardroom to the store room’. this positive example at the top, with clear guidance and adequate support, should enable relevant functions to join up their efforts in building resilience.
Read the document (registration required).
