Operational Resilience training and its use for BCM

[Alt30]

Hello, I have just completed BCM training courses and related micro-cert in Now Learning. The path was very helpful in understanding the concept of BCM and the practical tasks of implementation of it on the platform.

I was also tasked to look into Operational Resilience application. However, I can't really find anything like a course related to that product. By simply reading some marketing materials and quick look into product documentation pages it feels a little difficult to grasp what the product offers without deep diving and how it works with BCM. Is it mostly about dashboards it offers?

This section below taken from product documentation is giving me that impression:

Business Continuity Management and Operational Resilience

Business Continuity Management implements an approach wherein it builds a plan to respond quickly to a disruption that may impact your entire organization. Operational Resilience defines the steps that an organization must proactively take to prevent any operational disruptions.

Business Continuity Management is about analyzing the business disruptions, preparing a disaster recovery plan, and responding to a crisis event at the business process level. Operational Resilience implements a holistic approach about providing a complete end-to-end service delivery. Operational Resilience is about proactively monitoring the resilience statistics and ensuring that the service delivery happens at any cost.

As stated earlier, Business Continuity Management operates at the business process level. On the other hand, Operational Resilience provides a clear understanding of your company's operational resilience statistics on the dashboard. It includes the statistics for Business Continuity Management, Vulnerability Response, and so on.

I would appreciate an advice in direction of learning more about this product and especially how useful it is and how it works with BCM. Thanks in advance!

[Community Alums]

Hi @Alt30 ,

Hi @Alt30 ,

You can click on this link and explore more and learn :

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/washingtondc-governance-risk-compliance/page/product/grc-operatio...

[Alt30]

Thanks, Sandeep, for a quick response. I looked at product documentation pages and "learn" links prior posting my question so was looking here for practical bits of information from experts since it seems that training courses do not exists for that product. Is it because it is niche, not commonly used by clients?

[shriramks23]

Hi Yes, the former GRC fundamentals had a bit about Ops Res but not in length. I am also searching for the full course related to Ops Res and haven't found yet.

It is probably because of niche and not many customers use this in ServiceNow but outside of the tool.

[Mathew Hillyard]

Hi @shriramks23 

The only training I've seen in SNU is the DORA training; although it uses the Op Res application it's not the whole story.

There are two main issues with Operational Resilience as far as I can remember:

1. You cannot select a Service Offering as an entity (a bit of a deal breaker given an Important Business Service [IBS] is very likely to be a Service Offering)
2. It doesn't include a scenario testing feature (this prevents it being a one-platform solution)

I evaluated this a while back and didn't get past these stumbling blocks. I'm not aware if these have been remedied but didn't see anything about them in the last quarterly IRM roadmap meeting. It's not more complicated in structure than BCM - if you understand Entity structures and you're familiar with the Ops Res legislation then it should make sense (IBSes, Internal Services, the pillars etc.) When investigating its functionality it I didn't believe it was particularly complicated, but a training course would be nice.

I hope this helps!

Mat