More than Meeting a Regulatory Requirement
Implemented in the right way, Operational Resilience can realise benefits far beyond a more robust strategy and approach to resilience and recovery.
This is an opportunity to open doors towards a complete change of culture that drives and naturally encourages better business strategies, supports operational decisions and creates a change towards a culture based on business and customer outcomes.
Meeting the guidance creates Operational Resilience, right...?
You only need to scan through the websites of consultants and experts to identify the standard approach being offered in meeting regulatory expectations for Operational Resilience; identifying Important Business Services, mapping, setting Impact Tolerances and scenario testing. This is effectively no more than is set out by the guidance.
Such an approach creates a basic framework that will initially meet regulatory requirements. However, this alone will not create Operational Resiliency, will not create an understanding of service vulnerabilities, will not create a Business as Usual model to achieve and maintain resiliency or continued compliance, will not create a change of culture where non-operational business units are driven by business and customer outcomes. The list goes on.
There are some firms that will only want to meet the requirement and do no more, whether this be for strategic reasons, financial reasons or simple apathy towards the requirement. Not doing more through a lack of understanding or insight is a significantly wasted opportunity to naturally develop the business to operate like a business. And the most significant aspect of this is that cost is not relative to the benefits gained. The opportunities and benefits far outweigh the cost of taking the extra steps, which can very easily be recouped almost immediately as a result of the efficiencies gained.
So, how can Bembridge Consultancy Solutions do more?
Meeting Impact Tolerances alone will not identify resiliency levels. BCS create a model to identify and report vulnerabilities at dependency, team, business unit, pillar and service level. Awareness is key to achieving resiliency.
The BCS model will enable a clearer vision of where investment is needed and how this impacts services and outcomes. It enables and encourages the business to apply its own risk appetite to these decisions. However, visibility provides the control and and knowledge.
Better informed investment decisions also means a better informed approach to divestment too. Understanding and having visibility of the impact of divestment or cuts to operations enables more strategic and confident decisions to be made. BCS has already seen evidence of this where pre-Operational Resilience, decisions around restructure, cost cutting and resource reductions in a major UK firm would have been handled very differently had the visibility supplied by our OR model been in place.
Our model creates important links between the non-operational business areas and departments to operations and the customer, providing an understanding and an appreciation of their connection to and the impact they have on outcomes across the business.
The approach adopted by BCS enables the mapped information to remain relevant and up to date without the need for annual re-mapping exercises. This significantly efficient strategy ensures that valuable resource, funds and effort are not wasted recompleting the mapping undertaken as a part of the framework set up.
Ensuring not only existing dependencies are made more resilient but all future dependencies are too, is essential to avoid further future vulnerabilities, risks and incidents. BCS ensure the approach taken provides a pro-active approach to creating resiliency.
Identifying supply chains is as a result of Operational Resilience is a natural and easy benefit to gain. Understanding how to utilise this information outside of Operational Resilience is more difficult. Linking Operational Resilience to Operational Risk Management and Value Chain Management is a natural but difficult progression. BCS has clear vision of how this can be achieved with minimal effort whilst maintaining links between all requirements.
Recorded and presented in the correct way, Operational Resilience can provide significant efficiencies and improvements across other areas of the business. BCS ensures information is utilised in a way that will enable areas such as Business Continuity, IT Security and Business Change to make more informed, efficient and effective decisions within their own areas of expertise.
BCS has a very clear vision of what the business as usual model and environment should be. Naturally there are scales to this, defined by the requirements and objectives of the business. BCS understands these options and is able to present the TOM solutions, along with delivery of the benefits that each will provide.
Contact us to find out more about how we can help you develop your approach to Operational Resilience
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