Operational resilience now key to organisational success

At no point in his­to­ry has our depen­dence on dig­i­tal ser­vices been so high, at the same time, our tol­er­ance of poor IT sys­tems, secu­ri­ty, data-dri­ven work­flows and con­nec­tiv­i­ty has nev­er been so low. The Covid pan­dem­ic has also accel­er­at­ed the pace of change with busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion projects at full throt­tle. This has sparked many to reimag­ine their organ­i­sa­tions as dig­i­tal-first.

In the process, busi­ness­es are try­ing to become more agile, empow­er them­selves with vast amounts of action­able data, while con­sol­i­dat­ing and ratio­nal­is­ing their IT infra­struc­ture. All of these manoeu­vres, which are hap­pen­ing at once, are putting extra­or­di­nary pres­sures on the tech­ni­cal C‑suite and their teams – mak­ing oper­a­tional resilience a hot top­ic.

The term means many things to many organ­i­sa­tions, but the abil­i­ty of IT sys­tems to run unhin­dered, cope with change, react and act intel­li­gent­ly, deal with cyberthreats and dri­ve busi­ness out­comes are now vital goals for many. Oper­a­tional resilience there­fore becomes syn­ony­mous with suc­cess. Get it right and it allows deci­sion mak­ers to learn from the past, deal with the present and plan for the future.

“Oper­a­tional resilience is the abil­i­ty to quick­ly and deci­sive­ly cope with fast mov­ing or unseen changes that can­not be avoid­ed. If there’s any­thing we’ve seen over the past two years, hav­ing that capac­i­ty to absorb some of those unseen changes and to keep things mov­ing for busi­ness­es is impor­tant,” said Mark Woods, chief tech­ni­cal advi­sor at Splunk.

The oppo­site of oper­a­tional resilience is vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, which can be cost­ly. Roblox, a pop­u­lar glob­al video game, which recent­ly expe­ri­enced a tech out­age, lost $1.7bn in three days, close to 47 mil­lion peo­ple use it. Facebook’s sev­en-hour out­age cost mil­lions of dol­lars, wip­ing 5% off its share price. The costs are eye-water­ing, yet resilience requires invest­ment and new think­ing.

“We look at resilience through the three Ps – peo­ple, process, and plat­forms – and in that order,” said Shez Par­tovi, chief inno­va­tion and strat­e­gy offi­cer at Philips. “We also see it through the lens of pre­dict­ing the future.”

Vulnerability equals cost

The abil­i­ty to mon­i­tor the three Ps using data and tech are increas­ing­ly vital for organ­i­sa­tions. It is allow­ing them to take deci­sive action. This will deter­mine whether busi­ness­es thrive in the future. At the same time, we’re at a tip­ping point in terms of our depen­dence on IT to deliv­er; this is occur­ring across sec­tors, whether it’s finan­cial ser­vices, health­care or tele­coms.

“Our IT sys­tems are becom­ing utter­ly inte­gral to how we deliv­er care,” said Mark Reynolds, inter­im chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer at NHS Dig­i­tal. “When a ser­vice is unavail­able, care suf­fers. Oper­a­tional resilience is mak­ing sure our sys­tems and ser­vices are always avail­able, and always oper­a­tional.”

The fact is sys­tems do go down, cli­mate-induced floods in Ger­many ear­li­er this year forced Deutsche Telekom to re-eval­u­ate its resilience; 50,000 cus­tomers were impact­ed, some cus­tomers died. “We com­plete­ly lost our mobile and fixed line tele­coms. This gave us a kick to pri­ori­tise oper­a­tional resilience because it was down to our infra­struc­ture. The flood was com­plete­ly unseen. We are expect­ing much more in the future with cli­mate change. This gave us a new pri­or­i­ty,“ said Nils Stamm, chief dig­i­tal offi­cer for Deutsche Telekom.

Complexity can be a challenge

Busi­ness­es need to dig­i­tal­ly trans­form and con­stant­ly evolve which can make it chal­leng­ing to achieve oper­a­tional resilience. Organ­i­sa­tions need to make the most of their data to break down siloes, con­sol­i­date and sim­pli­fy IT sys­tems, whilst enabling the spread of tech-dri­ven archi­tec­tures to more busi­ness units. Deci­sion-mak­ers also need to fac­tor in age­ing IT stacks, siloed and new func­tions in this dri­ve toward agili­ty.

“Lega­cy sys­tems are an issue, while those peo­ple that man­age them are close to retire­ment. We have 150–200 sys­tems work­ing togeth­er to deliv­er each country’s bank­ing offer­ing. It is very dif­fi­cult, you want to change all of this at speed. You want all this to be dig­i­tal­ly enabled. You sim­ply can­not change that much, that fast,” added Tom­my Fly­nn, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer for whole­sale and rur­al at Rabobank.

In the past, under­stand­ing across IT and busi­ness units has been dif­fi­cult to con­nect and share. With sig­nif­i­cant dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion over the last few years, the oppor­tu­ni­ties for busi­ness-led insight have vast­ly increased. Whilst over­sight is now poten­tial­ly eas­i­er, crit­i­cal func­tions like secu­ri­ty still need to address evolv­ing con­cerns.

“We are see­ing a back­drop of increas­ing com­plex­i­ty when it comes to cyber- attacks with mul­ti­ple coun­tries, pub­licly say­ing they’re devel­op­ing their cyber- pow­er,” said Mary Haigh, chief infor­ma­tion secu­ri­ty offi­cer at BAE Sys­tems. “Know­ing the net­works you’ve got to pro­tect and being aware of the types of attack that come in and being ready for one on the scale of Solar­Winds, that we’ve not pre­dict­ed before is vital.”

Mass migra­tion to the cloud also makes it pos­si­ble to deploy state-of-the- art sys­tems and appli­ca­tions at affor­da- ble prices. Yet this in turn cre­ates new chal­lenges. “Once you migrate to the cloud and you are deal­ing with ever­green IT sys­tems. They become dif­fi­cult to keep up with. Ever­green sys­tems are con- tin­u­al­ly evolv­ing. There­fore, one thing we’ve been look­ing at is embrac­ing open source,” said Gis­sur Simonar­son, senior domain archi­tect for Fujit­su.

Anoth­er fac­tor wide­ly talked about is the peo­ple aspect, when it comes to deliv­er­ing resilience. Organ­i­sa­tions need to upskill staff along­side deploy­ing tech­nol­o­gy. “You can have amaz­ing process­es and plat­forms, but if peo­ple, both inside your organ­i­sa­tion and peo­ple you are inter­act­ing with, like clients and exter­nal stake­hold­ers, don’t under­stand the pur­pose and use of the tech­nol­o­gy you are imple­ment­ing, then you will have real chal­lenges. We want peo­ple to be resilient, agile and adapt to chang­ing tech­nolo­gies,” said Kim­ber­ly Mor­ris, chief peo­ple, tech­nol­o­gy & oper­a­tions offi­cer at Fifa.

Free up time for innovation

For busi­ness­es the abil­i­ty to see con- nect­ed risks and oppor­tu­ni­ties, make deci­sions and respond has nev­er been more impor­tant. This is what should be dri­ving invest­ment. It allows cor­po­ra­tions to be proac­tive, they can con­tin­u­al­ly improve, col­lab­o­rate across the organ­i­sa­tion, achieve agili­ty and dri­ve out­comes in real-time.

“Oper­a­tional resilience now allows you to do cor­po­rate strat­e­gy on steroids, you don’t have to wait for that five-year pro­gram. You’ve got the infor­ma­tion, you know what’s hap­pen­ing in the out­side world, you can shift the oper­a­tion. So, you can move for­ward quick­ly. Speed and agili­ty – that’s what it means to us,” said San­dra Bell, group head of organ­i­sa­tion­al resilience at Hitachi Cap­i­tal UK.

Once organ­i­sa­tions achieve bet­ter oper­a­tional resilience, it will allow them to focus on what they do best – their core busi­ness. This is like­ly to dri­ve fur­ther invest­ment.

“If you have less fire­fight­ing you have freed up time, you can free up human brain pow­er to lever­age tech­nol­o­gy and data to dri­ve inno­va­tion, to devel­op new prod­ucts and new busi­ness mod­els, which then have a big­ger impact on soci­ety,” said Amit Nas­tik, glob­al head for strat­e­gy and oper­a­tions and local mar­kets man­u­fac­tur­ing at Novar­tis. “Today resilience is key to future inno­va­tion.”

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