EDITOR ’ S QUESTION
HOW CAN BUSINESS LEADERS APPLY THE LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE PANDEMIC TO PREPARE FOR THE NEXT CRISIS ?
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic , resiliency has become a business priority . But traditional approaches struggle to integrate business resiliency with the digital environment in which companies increasingly operate . A new report from International Data Corporation ( IDC ) presents a digital resiliency framework that shows CEOs , CIOs and other business leaders how technology can support the entire organisation through the different stages of any business crisis . The Digital Resiliency Framework was introduced at the 56th annual IDC Directions conference , which this year focuses on delivering digital resiliency in a changed world .
“ Perhaps the most worrying takeaway from the recent pandemic concerns our lack of preparedness as nations , industries and companies to deal with similar systemic crises , which are inevitable in our increasingly digital and interconnected world ,” said Sandra Ng , Group Vice President for Research at IDC . “ Old approaches have proved to be wanting . Nonetheless , organisations must not only respond fast to threats , but also learn to opportunistically rise above them . Our new digital world calls out for a new technology-enabled approach to deal with future crises – digital resiliency .”
IDC believes that digital resiliency – the ability for an organisation to rapidly adapt to business disruptions by leveraging digital capabilities to not only restore business operations , but also capitalise on the changed conditions – must be a key objective in every organisation ’ s Digital Transformation ( DX ) efforts . Digital resiliency is also a central tenet of the future enterprise , IDC ’ s vision for the end state of DX .
IDC ’ s Digital Resiliency Framework includes three phases describing the timeline of enterprise responses to a crisis across a set of six organisational dimensions that are all enabled with a shared technology / digital architecture . Resiliency must be achieved within each of these organisational dimensions , which are interdependent ; a weakness in the digital resiliency of one dimension will likely impact other dimensions .
Digital resiliency across all these organisational dimensions must be underpinned by an open , integrated and holistic technology architecture . IDC calls this the DX platform and defines it as a combination of an intelligent core of data analytics , automation and decision support , a wide-variety of intelligent applications and intelligent services , such as governance , DevOps and orchestration .
For each dimension , IDC has highlighted the enterprise use cases ( funded projects ) that improve digital resiliency . These use cases can then be mapped to the digital technologies , data and analytics that support them as well as the business priorities and plans that promote them .
This framework enables CXOs to map the business priorities in one or more organisational dimensions to specific use cases that would achieve those goals .
Armed with a prioritised use case agenda , CIOs can then propose the relevant investments in the underlying technologies and tools that support those use cases and promote digital resiliency overall .
Recognising the challenges organisations are looking to solve and demonstrating how technology solutions can help overcome these obstacles will be critical to becoming a trusted digital resiliency partner .
34 INTELLIGENTCIO EUROPE www . intelligentcio . com