Organizational resilience and Covid-19
Recent researches (McKinsey and IBM Institute for Business Value to name a few) suggest that Covid-19 pandemic change CEO’s priorities – resilience of an organization now occupies top spots.
Organizational resilience is complex topic and should address whole value chain of given organization. Considering technology area alone we see that data and IT infrastructure resilience are usually addressed among the first, with variety of cybersecurity, backup/restore, and disaster recovery and business continuity tools protecting key financial and business data.
If there are no tools, organizations deploy rules to mitigate risks (e.g. financial rules, health and safety protocols, ethical codex, workplace and site security measures and more).
Unfortunately, oftentimes the way HOW the actual work is preformed (that is, the process) – within the rules, using the tools – is not captured at all or collects dust in a bottom drawer somewhere, not reflecting evolution of the process, its purpose or value. Then the knowledge of HOW the work is done becomes mythology – a story is passed from senior to junior team members over a cup of coffee, in the meetings or hastily drawn on a napkin in cafeteria. That can hardly be called resilience solution, yet we have all experienced it at some point(s) in our lives.
What happens if people who know ‘how’ will not be around? What if structure and duties change and suddenly there is a need to train people for new tasks? Even if tools and rules are in place, most of the processes span multiple systems, tools , people and departments – can you describe ‘how’ the process achieves the result your organization needs?
Netgrif process platform helps you to dramatically improve resilience of the business processes . We keep business requirements, process model and actual code tightly connected and always documented. Whenever you change or update the specification, model reflects the change and so does the code. Best of all, you have digital process definition which can be used in case of emergency to train employees, isolate ever changing IT systems infrastructure from business processes or place of work or serve as a base for digital transformation efforts once the Covid-19 pandemic is over.