Operational Resilience Beyond Compliance
The seemingly sudden focus on Operational Resilience was long in the making. Covid-19 just accentuated the urgency for it.
The below are some considerations on why Operational Resilience isNOT just compliance exercise.
Time is More Valuable Now: The customers/members are increasingly time sensitive to the delivery outcomes. Longer queues and waiting times can be considered ‘disruption’ to the ‘new-normal’ of service expectations. 24 hours uptime in financial services is a given now. Do we know if we are there yet?
Every “blip” Counts More Than Before: With services being accesses through multiple channels, every disruption in service will be visible and felt by the customer — often , before the business themselves realises it.
‘Long Covid’ in Business: Some of the issues that we consider as a temporary disruption has more underlying and longer term effects that are not captured or dealt with. Example: What is the implication on Data management and GDPR with the sudden move to ‘work from home’? Have we thought about it? Are we safe?
Impact Beyond You: The macro level impact is not given adequate consideration. Environmental , economic, cultural, social and political environments are not in consideration when we talk disruption.
Are We Really Learning? Even within organisations that have a documented learning strategy, effective learnings do not happen after a disruption. Once the disrupted service returns to normal, the learnings and their implementations are easily forgotten.
What is Our Driver? It is often misconstrued that technology is the key driver to business, and efficiencies come primarily from technological advances. The people and the physical interactions are just an afterthought. Each people interaction can be far more valuable than the technology that supports it, especially for businesses that depend on face to face interactions.
Known Risks, Unknown Mitigation: For small and medium scale organisations with legacy infrastructure, systems and workforce that cannot be updated or up-skilled effectively, there are inherent known risks that have to be mitigated. Often, some of these discussions are considered sensitive and avoided. Are we ready to discuss these and mitigate them?
Are Third-Parties Really “Third”?: The customers/members deal with the service provider as the source of their product. Whether a third-party is involved in the delivery is not a customer’s concern. Many organisations treat third-parties lightly and the completion of a due diligence template is where the monitoring ends. With the focus on the experience of the end customer, third-parties cannot be treated as a seperate entity in an organisation’s value delivery mechanism.
Process from the Past?: In pursuit of growth, legacy processes have never been reviewed and no one knows why we do things the way we do it. Every process step (Internal/external, Automated/Manual) in delivering the product or service matter to the end-customer experience. A simple retrospective could unlock cost/process efficiencies.
Covid-19 was the Easy One: It was easier for the customers/members to understand disruptions due to Covid-19. This affected everyone and therefore the pain was bearable. However, what about something that affects just one organisation? Will the customers/members be as nice?
Over the next few weeks, SolutionOut Consulting, intend to delve deeper into some of these topics. Best practices from previous and now-ongoing projects will be discussed.
Let’s talk. Stay tuned.
