Resilience, Agility, and Risk Management: Concepts and Implications

Resilience

Saugatuck research clients might be interested in looking at a research piece just written that delves into the emerging concept of organizational resilience, and aims to build an understanding of this critical area merging risk management with agility.

Recent natural disasters around the world have placed business recovery in high relief. At the same time, unified IT risk management and evolving ideas of Agility have come together to create a new concept of organizational resilience. A resilient organization is in the best position to recover from any disaster, from natural to financial, and emerge ahead. “This Strategic Perspective examines the concept of resilience, its meaning and implications for companies as well as for the IT department.  

Organizational resilience is the capacity to respond to catastrophic situations, to survive, and, where possible, to emerge stronger. It represents a plateau in thinking about risk, security, and business processes. Previously separate areas such as Financial Risk Management, Business Continuity Management, GRC, and Security are increasingly being consolidated to eliminate silos, improve efficiency, and ensure that important issues are not overlooked. At the same time, ideas of agility, modularity, collaboration, and lean infrastructure have been entering the enterprise as businesses attempt to cope with requirements for faster response to changes in markets, immediate response to threats, and a need to continually deploy new ideas.

Use of the Cloud to build resilience, to immediately restore services, and to consolidate risk management across numerous enterprise locations is becoming increasingly prevalent, and can be seen in the choices that executives make when disaster actually strikes.

Resilience is critical, because it provides a response to disasters of all sizes and from any direction that may be applied across the organization. It represents a coming together of concepts from traditional Disaster Recovery, GRC, and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), with emerging ideas of agility. As a relatively new formulation, it can provide an immediate advantage to vendors and enterprises who incorporate these concepts into IT operations. Resiliency is also likely to be of increasing concern to auditors and insurance companies, and can make the company more secure, better able to withstand audits, and less costly to insure.

Note: Ongoing Saugatuck subscription clients can access this premium research piece (1013STR) by clicking here, and inputting your ID and password. Non-clients can purchase and download this premium research piece by clicking here.