Organisational Resilience Focus

"The ability of an organisation's business operations to rapidly adapt and respond to internal or external dynamic changes - opportunities, demands, disruptions or threats - and continue operations with limited impact to the business." IBM

There have been several community events on earthquake related topics since the lethal 22 February earthquake. The focus in TelstraClear Seismics and the City is on Organisational Resilience and will feature the lessons learnt by public and private sector organisations, especially about business continuity planning, organisational resilience and recovery and new ways of working.

TelstraClear Seismics and the City will pick up on the different but complementary responsibilities of Boards and Management teams and point them to scenario planning processes and tools they can use to prepare for the worst while planning for the best.

Resilience and Agility in Response to a Disaster

The series of Canterbury earthquakes has inspired many companies to consider the factors that contribute to business resilience, and has provided numerous stories about how businesses can develop the capacity to recover from serious threats and respond to new circumstances with agility. They have regarded the February disaster as an opportunity to build a more secure, capable and responsive organisation.

Many organisations are insufficiently prepared to respond to incidents that threaten their businesses. Losing critical assets, processes, data or systems can send an organisation into a tailspin from which recovery could be impossible. In today's technological and economic environment, the ability to prevent or quickly recover from a disaster is a critical success factor.

This ability is called resilience, and it is an important part of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). Concepts of agility and resilience have been in development for at least the past four decades, with both progress and need accelerating recently in the wake of economic and technological change.

Agility began as "lean manufacturing," and has gained further validation through work on Complex Adaptive Mechanisms.

Resilience has been developing in Risk Management, Business Continuity Management (BCM), and Disaster Recovery (DR). Resilience is naturally aligned with Agility, and requires new ways of thinking about things, with reorganisation of business to meet the demands of the current risk environment and the pace of change.

Events are moving quickly today, partly with the onrush of new technology, but also due to the economic and market upheavals of recent years. New risks are emerging in every sector, from missed opportunity to IT security threats, economic hazards, and natural disasters. Companies need to develop the capacity to recover from serious threats and the agility to respond quickly.

Risk analysis is becoming an increasingly important and powerful tool for managers and administrators at every level. Techniques which were once only undertaken by analysts for a small set of problems are now being applied across the board to problems ranging from implementation of new systems to business continuity and disaster recovery.

This is aided by growth in available and easy-to-use checklists, spreadsheet templates and programmes. But it is driven by an increasingly rigorous approach to management, and development of standards, frameworks and regulations which demand analysis and verification of risk and related costs.

Registration of Interest

For more information contact Steering Team Convenor Lyall Lukey at SmartNet, email lyall@smartnet.co.nz;
phone 03 3228293 or 021310808