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
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