After the covid pandemic, the business continuity and resilience landscape has now reset, the BCI (Business Continuity Institute) suggests in its latest Future of Business Continuity and Resilience Report.
In a foreword, BCI chair Christopher Home said: “While there was a phase for calling for a ‘Chief Resilience Officer’ to be put in place in organisations post-pandemic to help nurture a resilient culture, the popularity of this new role has now waned, but it has been replaced by shorter reporting lines to the C-suite and a defined member of the C-suite taking responsibility for resilience – often aided by new operational resilience regulation.
Furthermore, soft skills continue to be valued above academic qualifications for professionals. While there are exceptions for roles requiring a specific knowledge or skillset, many managers appreciate the qualities a degree can bring in the form of learning and research skills, communication, quick thinking, and agile thinking skills, – these are considered more important in the hiring process than a dedicated, resilience-orientated degree.”
Despite the new ways of working however, professionals still value the core components of ‘traditional’ business continuity roles, he added. He said that the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is set to remain at the heart of resilience, for example.
The BCI has found that business resilience has become the norm; ‘silos are dissolving, reporting lines to the C-suite are being reduced and business continuity (BC) managers and/or resilience managers are increasingly becoming part of the strategic conversation’. While not so much is heard of the title ‘chief resilience officer’, a survey found shorter reporting lines to the C-suite – often through a ‘Head of Resilience’ – to a defined C-suite member.
Soft skills may even trump academic qualifications, the report hints; the ‘BC or resilience manager now needs to be someone who is a relationship builder, a communicator, a quick thinker and someone who can be agile – and sometimes even tangential – in their thinking’.
A power outage affecting workers from home remains a risk as near all, 96.7pc of those surveyed report that ‘at least some staff’ expect the flexibility to work from home for some of the time, but home worker resilience is still viewed as secondary (in most cases) to resilience in the office. As for what keeps business continuity managers ‘awake at night’, ransomware and cyber threats are increasing, the report says.
The report, by analyst David Lea and the BCI’s head of thought leadership Rachel Elliott, was sponsored by Riskonnect, formerly Castellan Solutions. You can download the report and others from the BCI by signing up (for free) with email address and password at https://www.thebci.org/knowledge/search-knowledge.html.
What they say
Rachel Elliott said: “When we published the first Future of Business Continuity and Resilience report at the height of the pandemic in 2020, practitioners were enjoying a new level of appreciation in organisations. They were seeing additional investment in tools and staff, were becoming more involved in the strategic side of business and were becoming trusted partners to the board on questions relating to the overall resilience of the organisation.
“This report shows this attention has continued to remain in many organisations, which, coupled with the increased regulatory attention on operational resilience, means resilience is now an unavoidable topic for boardroom agendas. As a result of these changes, practitioners are now finding they have to be communicators and collaborators, as well as becoming more agile and adaptive in their approach – in addition to remaining experts in the more ‘traditional’ aspects of BC. Indeed, most practitioners believe that the role of the BIA is now more important than ever – it is the spine of a resilient organisation.”
