Imagine getting to the office one morning to realize that all your carefully laid financial plans have been undermined by unforeseen disruptions in the systems that support the business. Maybe you didn’t even make it to the office before you started getting phone calls – “I can’t login to payroll” or “Our order entry system isn’t working” or simply “HELP! We don’t know what is happening!”
This is something that actually happens every day to a peer of yours in another organization. It might not make the news. To others, it might not even sound like a big deal. But YOU – you can feel that pain. You can imagine what that might be like. You know what could happen to your business’s financial stability if a disaster or disruption prevents your IT infrastructure from doing its job.
The biggest risk to any organization is the financial risk. How much money can you spend in the face of disaster? Can you withstand a denied insurance claim? Can you handle an unexpected compliance fine? What if you have a number of customers cancel at one time?
Maybe you’re not responsible for IT. You might only rarely interact with your IT people or IT service providers. But the systems they manage can make the difference in whether or not YOUR job runs smoothly or goes completely off the rails.
Your financial responsibilities and IT’s systems responsibilities combine with others to create operational resilience – the very thing that’s needed to keep a business running in the event of a disaster or unplanned disruption.
For a financial leader, understanding this concept opens the door to minimizing downtimes and maximizing productivity. But what does resilience truly mean? Can it turn potential chaos into tranquility? Let’s delve deeper.
Why Does Operational Resilience Matter?
Picture your company as a well-oiled machine. Each cog, each component plays its part seamlessly. Now, consider the impact when one of these parts falters. Suddenly, the simplicity of keeping cash flowing and ensuring smooth operations turns into a tangled mess of broken metal.
Operational resilience offers the framework to withstand and adapt to these disruptive challenges – operational risks, yes, but also financial risks that could come about as a result of being found non-compliant to regulations that govern your business. It’s like having a dependable blueprint when unexpected rains flood your plans. How prepared are you and your team to handle such disruptions?
Breaking Down Operational Resilience
To make resilience tangible, we break it down into pillars that support its structure. This structure supports business continuity in the face of both technological mishaps and natural calamities.
Wait. Business continuity? What’s that exactly? Frankly, it’s an overused IT industry term that basically means “keep the business running even if the wheels have fallen off.” For most people, it’s easier to relate to “how do we keep the business running if there’s a tornado or a flood or we get hacked or…?” – any one of a number of disruptive scenarios occur.
But what supports this business continuity framework, you ask?
As a finance professional, a numbers person, a person who loves all that is predictable and manageable, the answer to that question is right in your wheelhouse. The answer is planning ahead to mitigate the risks. Planning ahead to protect your company. Governance yields risk mitigation. This is why developing CFO cybersecurity leadership capabilities has become essential for modern financial leaders.
Commitment to ongoing risk assessment supports the decisions you make. This includes conducting a comprehensive shadow IT risk assessment to identify unsanctioned technology use that could undermine your operational resilience efforts.
Delving into behavioral insights, one understands the psychological craving for security — the personal assurance that when disruption strikes, you and your team know what to do. Isn’t it reassuring to have certainty amidst uncertainty?
There’s a line in the movie Hidden Figures, where Katherine, trying to puzzle out how to bring the John Glenn’s capsule from an elliptical orbit to a parabolic orbit, says “math is always dependable.” (You can watch that scene on YouTube here, if you like.)
What I love about this – and how it applies here – is that planning and implementing governance and risk mitigation strategies feels like a way to keep unexpected and unplanned disruptions under control – at least as much as we can control them. To make them dependable – like math is for numbers people.
While math is dependable, weather isn’t, bad actors aren’t, your building’s mechanical systems aren’t. But planning ahead to manage those risks? Your processes, your tools, and your people? Those ARE dependable.
It’s how YOU create and maintain calm in the face of chaos – to metamorphically sprinkle oil over churning waters.
Implementing the Resilience Framework
This leads directly to our continuing discussions about guardrails – those guardrails ARE the governance structure that mitigate risk.
Are your plans flexible enough to pivot, yet robust enough to withstand pressure? Exploring your organization’s adaptability and establishing guardrails is key to maintaining normalcy during turbulent times.
What steps can you begin implementing today to embed resilience into your operations?
Your journey will likely start with assessing your current IT capacity and capabilities. Knowing what your internal team can – and cannot – handle is crucial to your decision process when it comes to controlling the risks your organization faces.
The Peace of Mind Operational Resilience Brings
You own the biggest risk – the money. It’s fitting that you, then, are the keeper of the peace.
When the framework is established, the magic unfolds. Suddenly, unexpected disruptions lose their bite. The numbers align, projections hold true, and continuity becomes more than just a distant goal.
This peace of mind is rooted not in luck, but in the carefully calculated steps taken to safeguard your enterprise. So the question becomes, not if you need operational resilience, but rather, how soon can you start? And, if you’ve started already, do you have everything covered?
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does operational resilience matter to financial leaders?
The biggest risk to any organization is the financial risk. How much money can you spend in the face of disaster? Can you withstand a denied insurance claim? Can you handle an unexpected compliance fine? Operational resilience offers the framework to withstand and adapt to these disruptive challenges — operational risks, yes, but also financial risks that could come about as a result of being found non-compliant to regulations that govern your business.
What is business continuity and what supports it?
Business continuity basically means 'keep the business running even if the wheels have fallen off.' The answer to what supports this business continuity framework is planning ahead to mitigate the risks. Planning ahead to protect your company. Governance yields risk mitigation.
How do you start implementing an operational resilience framework?
Your journey will likely start with assessing your current IT capacity and capabilities. Knowing what your internal team can — and cannot — handle is crucial to your decision process when it comes to controlling the risks your organization faces. The journey toward operational resilience isn't about solving every potential problem at once; it's about preparing for them through a strategic approach.