Before COVID, companies admitted lax exercise management protocols for crises and business continuity disruptions. After? Things have improved but survey data suggest not fast enough. What’s going on, and what digital exercise management capabilities do companies need to stay resilient?
Exercise management has stalled.
Well, according to the latest BCI Resilience survey, organizations still have their work cut out, when it comes to exercise management.
What’s the problem, exactly?
The data show that exercises are still not being completed frequently enough. When they are being completed, exercises aren’t being performed at a sufficient scale.
More concerning still, exercise management programs, once developed, are failing to prioritize complex disruption scenarios. And these are the scenarios likeliest to affect clients in this era of compounding crises.
Best-practice frameworks for performing exercises.
What can you do for your clients, then?
For one, you can get clients to see religion on best-practice exercise frameworks for performing exercises.
International standard ISO/DIS 22398, for one, lays out a best-practice framework for performing resilience testing and exercises.
The standard outlines the procedures that are necessary for the planning, implementing, managing, evaluating, reporting, and improving of exercises, as well as the testing designs needed to assess the crisis-readiness of an organization.
It also instructs organizations to conduct a needs and gap analysis. The purpose of this analysis is to establish the need for exercises and testing in the first place.
Digital capabilities to improve exercise management.
Of course, a best practice, full-lifecycle exercise management program won’t just implement itself. Clients will have to get over the last hump. What can they do?
They should consider integrated business resilience software.
Using the new digital transformation technologies of analytics and workflows, these platforms help clients to (1) better anticipate and identify trends, (2) prevent situations that may generate an interruption, and (3) respond more efficiently to disruptions that do arise.
How does it work?
In the realm of digital exercise management, exercise dashboards navigate clients and their user teams through each phase of an exercise, ensuring everyone understands what needs to be completed and when.
From there, the platform’s automation capabilities ensure the correct teams and/or personnel are invited to participate in the exercise and receive regular updates via automated notifications throughout the exercise.
Once the exercise is activated, all client users can easily see what type of exercise is being
completed. And based upon the affected assets/activities, the recovery strategies required for the assets will automatically be populated for the team.
The platforms provide the capability to record meetings, minutes, and action items. This is a mirror of the platform’s incident management functionality, designed as such to ensure a consistent user experiment. Which gives clients the benefit of familiarity in the event of a crisis.
Finally, COVID demonstrated the importance of exercise management for remaining resilient against disruption. Unfortunately, too many organizations haven’t fully internalized the lesson.
Don’t let your clients fall behind. Give them the digital exercise management tools they need to stay ahead. To better understand what those tools are, download our latest guide to digital exercise management.
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