Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 33 | Page 47

Others have grabbed fewer headlines but have been as impactful; a surge in demand for customer communication, shifting regulatory changes, and maintaining workforce efficiency. This is where CIOs really do have a central role to play. As we know, the ability to quickly transition to home working has been make or break in recent months. In the face of increased communication needs, what has been particularly worrying is the problems organisations have faced moving knowledge, data and associated operations between sites and personnel. When workers need to be quickly deployed to other sites or to work from home, there needs to be secure, compliant operational infrastructure to support it – this is lacking in many cases. Over 70% of organisations reported to us that their ability to make this transition was severely hampered by a lack of remote access to data and documents. With workers unable to access the documents they needed, just 10% of executives were confident they had met SLAs, with the worst affected areas being customer communications, order fulfilment and sales support – it’s not hard to imagine the fall out of these dropped and cancelled services. “ NOW MORE THAN EVER, THERE IS AN INCREASING NEED FOR ENTERPRISE-WIDE TRANSFORMATION PROGRAMMES THAT FOCUS ON GETTING THE BASICS OF OPERATIONAL RESILIENCE RIGHT. Resilience in an environment that requires home working or more flexible offices is built upon the ability to access and process documents securely and in compliance with regulatory requirements. Digitising document processing services – both paperbased and electronic – is no longer just a stop on the way to Digital Transformation, it is a foundation of operational resilience. Steps CIOs should take to bolster operational resilience 1. Ask more of partners It goes without saying that organisations need a robust Business Continuity plan in place, but what many fail to do is ensure that these are end-to-end, encompassing suppliers and outsourced services. Under 40% of organisations were satisfied with their outsourcing partners during this crisis. Now is the time to rethink your partners and how you work with them. That might mean amending contractual terms, finding new partners but should most certainly mean ensuring that they can support and deliver your continuity plans in the face of crisis. 2. Agile and location-agnostic resilience One of the key issues underpinning low operational resilience has been that, despite our global economy, localised thinking still reigns. Business Continuity plans are more often than not city – and www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 47