Operational resilience is the new C-suite KPI

A smart resilience posture can be assessed not just within IT or cybersecurity, but with functional programs, suppliers and people. Ideally, it should reflect the broad organization. The functional programs are actionable at a policy and control level. The rollup provides the perspective required by C-levels and the board.

The right resilience posture can both spark and answer questions like:

• “How well are we supporting the expectations of employees and customers?”
• “How will a terrible hurricane season affect my business? My workforce? My customers?”
• “How well have we thought through the potential scenarios for disaster and disruption?”
• “What can we do to reduce key risks?”

This laddering of perspectives is possible when you overcome the stovepipes and fiefdoms of information and decision-making around the organization. Resilience is also an ideal use case for your company’s digital enterprise platform, as it pulls asset, IT context, and security data from IT; enriches it with human resources, vendor, health and safety, and facilities data; and organizes it all based on business criticality and risk.

A successful resilience posture requires clear lines of authority. “Resilience requires clarity about who really owns the risk,” says Kevin Barnard, ServiceNow’s chief innovation officer, who previously spent 14 years at GE and GE Capital, where he managed IT disaster recovery, business continuity, and crisis management. “Business processes are the main priority and their owners are the primary beneficiary of operational resiliency,” he adds. “If IT is still the decision-maker in this conversation, you’re doing it wrong.”

Operational resilience involves continuous collection, evaluation, and monitoring of changes, internal and external. It also requires agility—planning for what you can, handling what you must as it happens.

That’s difficult to pull off without digitizing work processes. In a new global survey of executives and employees commissioned by ServiceNow, 91% of executives reported they still conduct routine workflows offline. That won’t fly for operational resilience. Manual and paper-based systems are already problematic under normal conditions, as they add delays, errors, and costs. When you add in all the work relocation requirements brought on by a global pandemic, and you can see why these operational workflows need to go digital.

“Before COVID, we thought long-term crisis management would last a week. We didn’t imagine the shutdowns and workplace changes,” says Sundari Parekh, vice president of security governance, risk and resilience at InComm. “Our business continuity plans and frameworks built with ServiceNow permitted us to continue to run our processes, be flexible, and respond with minimal impact to InComm or our clients.”

There’s a very attractive carrot here. Digitally transformed companies are already more resilient and more profitable than their digital laggard peers. Our comprehensive analysis of operational data from thousands of large enterprises on the ServiceNow Now Platform® worldwide found that even before the pandemic hit, companies that had digitally transformed their operations were already seeing gains in cost savings and operating margins.

Analysis from IDC also shows that a “digital divide” exists between the performance of digital leaders and laggards during the pandemic.