Enjoyed a very long, but full day in Sydney today. Not only managed to get some paid work done, but also attended a very interesting discussion on resilience – and got to catch up with some old friends.
The main motivation for the visit was to attend a round table event, “Building Resilience in your Organisation – Is it really possible?“, hosted by Rod Crowder, from ops.centre. An interesting and diverse group attended, and always good when it includes a mix of new people, people you already know, like Chris Miller who brings some interesting experience and stories to share, and people you have not seen for years – like David Bowden (Harbour IT).
The diverse backgrounds brought a number of different perspectives to the conversation. What is resilience, what does it mean – is always a good place to start. I regret to inform you that we made no major breakthroughs on that score.
What the discussion did lead me to think about was the range of different things that people could take away and follow up that would make their company more resilient. (I am coming to the view that we should just talk about more and less resilient rather than resilience being considered a binary outcome.)
These were simple ideas that one could say – I hadn’t thought about that, I need to go and see how that would apply to me. Actually making that follow through action is likely to increase resilience – you have thought about an issue and maybe addressed a potential vulnerability.
In this day of connected business and thinking about about BC and Risk impact across our supply chains, it was fascinating to hear from some of the outsource service providers in the group how few requests they received from their clients to learn about the service providers contingency plans and capabilities. One of these providers would have to represent a massive share of his market, and did not recall any requests.
Scary when I think about how many companies in this country would probably rely on that service provider in a disaster.
There was also some interesting stories shared, in particular about how we can adapt to the unplanned by finding creative ways to bridge back to the events we had planned for – and being able to think laterally about the event we had planned for and how that response could address a different type of incident.
The group also had some interesting discussion around the subject of can we/should we have a standard for resilience. It am rather pleased to report that the consensus was that we cannot!
Many thanks to Rod and ops.centre for putting this event on, we need to discuss this concept of resilience more in order to put some meat on the bones.
It was also good to catch up with an old colleague, David Smith, from Garaguru. David goes back with me to the “mainframe reservation” and these days he is distributing cloud ERM/CRM solutions in the Asia/Pacific region. Same industry, but adapting to a whole new world.
More importantly was the enthusiasm that he clearly demonstrated for what he was doing. As I commented in my weekly wrap last week, it is not goals and vague ideas that get things done, it is passion. Good work Smithy.
My response to the question “is it possible”?
Yes, but it takes a lot of work, and there is no quick fix solution you can buy.
What do you think, is it possible?
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