Looking to secure a decisive advantage in this volatile economy? Don’t turn to product differentiation, human, or strategic acquisitions – at least at not first. Why’s that? Building business resilience has displaced those traditional sources of advantage. And companies who haven’t gotten the memo will soon be forced to wake up.
Organizations get rewarded for building business resilience
For one, the data shows that seven in ten organizations now report planning to increase their investments in building business resilience.
Risk officers are even more aggressive. Nine in ten are planning to increase investment in building business resilience – that’s according to PWC’s latest Global Crisis Survey.
Why does it matter? Well, firms with strong business resilience processes tend to come out of disasters stronger.
Those that don’t are negatively impacted by crises. Meanwhile, their competitors sprint off.
Best-practice strategies for building business resilience
The remaining question is how. Senior leaders will have to move fast to implement business resilience strategies to garner a competitive advantage in the market.
They can start, though, by designating a core crisis response team. This team will be mobilized to execute the crisis response plan to keep critical operations moving.
Of course, the team will have to design the plan first. Remember: that plan should be in alignment with the larger corporate strategy – hence, the importance of C-suite involvement in the process.
Nor would it hurt for the plan to account for the important lessons learned during the COVID crisis, as well.
From there, the crisis response team should routinely test and refine the plan.
That signals to the rest of the organization that business resilience is prioritized, not a check-the-box exercise, but instead a source of business advantage in the form of an integrated business resilience and critical event management program.
The ROI of such a program includes:
- Improved ability to anticipate and identify threats
- Faster response activation, through visibility and clarity of roles and plans
- Better access to critical data and insights
- Strengthened trust with stakeholders
- Ability to emerge stronger
Three digital critical event management technology capabilities needed to secure a competitive advantage
Execution is key. Senior leaders can’t afford to dawdle.
They should start now, and digital critical event management technology can help, by applying best practices to plan for, respond to, and manage critical events and exercises.
Within that software market, what innovative capabilities work towards building a business advantage? We think the following three capabilities stand out:
- Crisis management. Advanced solutions that apply best practices to plan for, respond to, and manage critical events and exercises. They enable faster response, better collaboration using plans and playbooks, smart workflows, and real-time dashboards and insights, ensuring better incident response, decision-making, and continuous improvement.
- Incident response plans and checklists. Best-practice libraries included, so that organizations can easily create crisis strategies and action plans for different types of events that define the required strategy, action items, completion time targets, and people involved.
- Crisis communications. Single, source-of-truth systems that help organizations manage complex communications, centralizing, approving, and standardizing their crisis response. These solutions provide effective communication pathways for all aspects of incident management.
Finally, implementing stronger business resilience protocols to address growing risk is just as much a strategic business decision as launching ground-breaking products into the market.
How to go about it, though, has long been the question. We suggest designating a crisis response team under your C-suite sponsorship to sift through lessons learned and create best-practice plans based on larger corporate objectives.
From there, tie it all together with critical event management software to ensure better incident response, decision-making, and continuous improvement. For more software capabilities to consider, download our buyer’s guide to critical event management software.
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