Eight Technology Tips to Make Your Organisation Resilient

Noggin IT  Eight Technology Tips to Make Your Organisation Resilient

The role of technology is critical in attaining organisational resilience and goes far beyond business continuity and the need to keep you systems up and running. It contributes to resilience on all levels by assisting connectivity and collaboration throughout an enterprise especially in times of crisis.

In order to be resilient, just like the people and culture of an organisation, technology needs to be agile and flexible. It also needs to connect people, processes and information, providing situational awareness and enabling people to make faster, more informed decisions during a crisis. There must be an alignment of information technology with business goals.

The Noggin IT top technology tips for organisational resilience are all about connecting the dots.

Enabling connectivity and collaboration

To attain resilience, your organisation’s technology should:

1. Be relevant to the role: technology needs to align with the business goals of the enterprise or be flexible enough to configured, implemented or installed as such.
2. Intuitive to use: during a crisis people experience stress which affects decision making and need technology that is unambiguous in its use. This is when processes and interfaces need to be kept simple and clean with only the relevant information and options presented to the people involved.
3. Automate processes (where possible): This mitigates the possible of human error especially in times of duress.
4. Provide situational awareness of the relevant information: A single source of truth has been the driving mantra of data warehousing technologies for decades. The only difference when considering risk, business continuity and incident management is it often needs to be real time. Everyone needs to be making decisions based on the same information at any point in time.
5. Turn unstructured information into structured information: Social media has created many streams of valuable and timely, but unstructured, information. These should be captured and integrated into the situational awareness of the enterprise where appropriate.
6. Focus on the lessons learnt as much as the prevention: Does the technology provide for audit trails and analysis? Can this information be shared?
7. Be integrated. A key maturity driver is to reduce siloes
8. Be resilient itself: redundancy, failsafe, backup and security are the key issues here.

If your organisation’s technology achieves all of the above, it will go a long way to enabling connectivity and collaboration and a faster, more cohesive response to a crisis or other significant change.

The Noggin OCA Enterprise Resilience suite of solutions, OCA Risk, OCA Incident Manager, and OCA Alerts espouse these principles to facilitate and enhance connectivity and collaboration throughout the organisation and even with external key stakeholders.