Operational Resilience – Your blueprint for building a resilient organization

The ten myths of operational resilience

1. Operational resilience is just a one-time project
   Treating operational resilience as isolated, one-off projects leads to fragmented efforts. It must be an ongoing, integrated practice across the entire organization, not something you “start over” with each new regulation.
2. Regulatory compliance alone guarantees resilience
   Relying solely on tools like Excel or specialized platforms to meet compliance often misses the bigger picture. True resilience requires a holistic approach that integrates IT, processes, people, data, risk, and third-party relationships.
3. Business continuity is enough to achieve operational resilience
   While business continuity is important, operational resilience goes beyond it, addressing the ability to prevent, respond, and adapt to unforeseen disruptions—not just recover from them.
4. Operational resilience is only necessary if it’s mandated by regulation
   Even when it’s not a regulatory requirement, operational resilience is crucial for any organization’s long-term survival and adaptability in an increasingly volatile environment.
5. Each regulation should be addressed separately
   Tackling regulations in isolation leads to inefficiencies and technical debt. An integrated, enterprise-wide approach helps create a more resilient operating model that can handle multiple challenges.
6. Quick fixes or point solutions will make an organization resilient
   Short-term “quick win” solutions often create technical debt and limit long-term resilience. A sustainable strategy is needed to build resilience into the organization’s core operations.
7. Operational resilience is purely a technical issue
   It involves much more than just IT. True resilience requires collaboration across departments, including people, processes, and risk management, to create a coordinated response to disruptions.
8. Silos don’t impact resilience efforts
   When information and resources are siloed, it becomes harder to respond effectively to disruptions. A cohesive approach across departments ensures a faster, more unified response to incidents.
9. Only financial services need to focus on operational resilience
   While financial services face strict regulations, every industry is vulnerable to disruptions—whether from cyber-attacks, supply chain issues, or geopolitical events—making operational resilience essential across all sectors.
10. AI and digital transformation reduce the need for resilience
    As technology evolves, new risks emerge. Digital transformation and AI tools introduce new vulnerabilities that organizations must anticipate and address as part of their operational resilience strategy.

Tools for building operational resilience

An integrated approach to operational resilience is essential to ensure compliance and build an effective shield against disruptions. A combined view of business and IT processes is important to understand the whole picture of your operations. A combination of tools like business process analysis, process mining, and risk and compliance management offer a competitive advantage by enabling a comprehensive approach that applies to all current and future regulations.

ARIS for operational resilience

At the core of your business, processes connect everything you do. ARIS offers unmatched transparency, enabling every team member to clearly understand relationships, interdependencies, and impacts. This clarity is essential for enhancing operational resilience and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.

Operational resilience toolset

An effective toolkit for operational resilience comprises a well-balanced integration of various disciplines, use cases, and assets.

Three disciplines to master Operational Resilience

Business Process Analysisgives you insights into the business and the transparency needed to analyze the processes supporting it. This helps you identify important business services and make them resilient to disruption.

Process Mining helps you understand how your processes are really executed based on measured data. So, you can detect weaknesses and inconsistencies that enable process optimization.

Risk and Compliance Management includes identifying your risks, assessing them for impact and probability as well as taking appropriate measures to minimize them. To achieve operational resilience, you need to control all your risks and related assets.

Six use cases on your way to sustainable resilience.

Operations Optimization in the context of operational resilience involves understanding all elements that affect important business services. With these insights, you can conduct scenario testing for various types of disruption and address any gaps. Risk and compliance management, business continuity, and the application landscape all contribute to optimizing the operating model.

Regulatory Management is about ensuring your company is compliant by being in control of all relevant regulations. Mapping regulatory requirements to your business landscape creates the necessary transparency needed to clearly understand where and how regulatory issues could impact your operations. Regular control tests ensure you are compliant with regulations and internal policies.

Service Provider Management entails overseeing and coordinating the activities of third-party service providers to ensure they meet the organization’s requirements and standards. Service provider management is crucial for operational resilience because it ensures that the third-party services essential to your organization are reliable, secure, and capable of maintaining continuity during disruptions.

Application Landscape refers to the systems, policies, and technologies needed to protect business operations from threats. It considers business strategy and risk tolerance, providing guidance through reference architectures, operating model blueprints, standard security patterns, and foundational policies and principles for solution architects.

Governance involves implementing policies, guidelines, standards, and controls to manage change effectively. In the context of operational resilience, it includes activities such as documenting the ownership of all ICT assets, assigning responsibilities for risk-related roles, building workflows to embed risk management processes within the organization, and using policies to guide planning and change management.

Business Continuity is an organization’s ability to continue delivering products or services following a disruptive incident. It involves anticipating potential threats, identifying critical locations, IT systems, processes, staff and external suppliers, and defining how to keep critical processes and systems operational.

Three key assets critical to your enterprise’s resilience.

Supporting processes are the workflows that ensure ‘Important Business Services’ (IBSs) function properly. By mapping these processes to IBSs, organizations can pinpoint which processes are essential to delivering these key services.

Important Business Services are the services that a firm provides, that, if disrupted, could threaten its stability or even the entire operations. Examples include payment processing, customer support, and critical infrastructure.

Critical Resources are the essential elements that enable an organization to continue its operations even during disruptions. These resources are vital for achieving operational resilience and include technology, people, processes, facilities, information, and third parties.

The three phases for success

Successful Operational Resilience is achieved through three key phases: setting a clear strategy, analyzing the operating model, and continuously testing, learning, and monitoring.

Set Strategy

1. Define stakeholders and objectives
   Fully understand your stakeholders and assess the value and risks you bring to them; these insights inform your objectives.
2. Identify Important Business Services
   Identify the Important Business Services required to meet stakeholder needs, especially those whose failure would negatively impact stakeholders.
3. Set impact tolerances
   Establish acceptable limits for disruptions impacting key stakeholders. For example, define acceptable downtime for essential services like internet banking.

Analyze operating model

1. Map supporting processes
   Identify the sub-processes involved in delivering each important business service.
2. Identify critical resources
   Identify and map critical resources (e.g. people, physical assets, technology assets, etc.) to each process, and by default, each important business service.
3. Assess health
   Assess the resilience of each resource in terms of its ability to withstand stress (prevention) and also the ability to recover from stress (cure).

Test, learn & monitor

Scenario testing, learning, and monitoring

1. Test against scenarios
   Identify extremely disruptive scenarios that could impact resource delivery for key business services, such as natural disasters, pandemics, or social unrest. Evaluate the potential outcomes and your ability to meet impact tolerances.
2. Learn & improve
   For the scenarios that exceed tolerance, identify where improvements can be made to the processes to make them more resilient, focusing on prevention and robustness before cure.
3. Monitoring & reporting
   Use the latest technologies like process mining, automations, or dashboarding to continuously monitor operations. Whenever useful and possible, use automations to detect and document issues, incidents, controls, or tests.

Strengthen your resilience with the ARIS Suite

The ARIS Suite offers tools for deep analysis of processes and operations, empowering you to identify areas for improvement and make fast, informed decisions. Through Business Process Analysis and Process Mining, gain invaluable insights for scenario testing, while risk and compliance management ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
This integrated solution gives you a 360° view into your operational resilience management, supporting your organization’s long-term success.