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Operational Resilience: The next evolution of better customer service?

01 December 2021

For many years, businesses have focussed successfully on BCP and DR to improve the resilience of their people and technology to support business infrastructure.

We have seen significant improvements made in response to business incidents, however, these are all inwardly looking improvements. These disciplines take a view on the likelihood of a disruptive event occurring whilst Operational Resilience takes the view that disruptive events will occur regardless of likelihood.

Operational Resilience drives towards a customer-centric view of the services that businesses provide and seeks to improve how that service is delivered, and in the event of major disruption, how it can be maintained and fully recovered. To achieve this, businesses need to build their business service models from a customer viewpoint, and these models need to include everything that is involved in providing that service, (e.g., people, technology, premises, third parties, goals, control environments, obligations, etc…).

Developing these business service models presents many significant challenges. The accumulation, storage, linking, and visualisation of data are to name a few. Additional challenges include the responsibility and execution of building models that span every area of the businesses and the process of building Operational Resilience. Meeting these challenges requires a business to specifically articulate good outcomes for Operational Resilience, not just goals. And the business needs to ensure that these are proportional to the scale of the organisation and the services it provides to its customers.

Operational Resilience should not be viewed as a replacement for good disciplines such as BCP and DR, but rather as something that builds and enhances the value of BCP and DR to the benefit of the business and the customer.

Successfully building Operation Resilience from within will lead organisations to construct their business services as resilient by design. This will enable them to be better equipped to adapt to changing customer requirements and recover from disruption.

This can only result in greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Kelvin Ceberg – Head of Operational Resilience at KA2 Limited.

For more information on our Operational Resilience workshops or to find out how KA2 delivers resilient business and technology operations through ServiceNow IRM solutions, please get in touch.