The new America First Resilience Strategy tells the story: “Resilience is a strategic capability that promotes prosperity, deters adversaries, and preserves our sovereignty in moments of crisis.”

The White House is not alone in this understanding. Leading organizations increasingly recognize operational resilience as a critical enterprise capability to help leaders make better decisions in uncertain times to protect revenue, enable growth and preserve customer trust.

With the United States government behind this growing movement, top businesses now have yet another reason to invest in enterprise resilience. But why has enterprise resilience moved center stage at this moment? And what can organizations do to build true enterprise resilience?

Document-based compliance cannot meet the demands of today’s modern enterprise

Many companies are putting AI to work faster than they can govern it. At the same time, cyberattacks, extreme weather, supply chain challenges, workforce disruptions, and a wide range of other sometimes-unforeseen events have created cascading, often simultaneous, risk.

Yet, most companies continue to focus on compliance rather than enterprise resilience.

These are two very different things.

• Compliance asks: Does our organization have a documented plan?
• Resilience asks: Can our enterprise execute successfully when conditions change?

Documentation-based compliance alone no longer works amid growing, increasingly complex, systemic risk. Disruptions don’t stay inside the predefined scenarios. Your plan might look good on paper, but what you really need is the ability to understand context, make decisions, and act.

Compliance creates confidence that documentation exists. Resilience empowers organizations to adapt as needed to the changing nature of the vulnerabilities and risks they are facing.

New visibility can provide businesses the needed context to make decisions and act quickly

In speaking to stakeholders, including American citizens, industry, state and local governments and the federal government, the new White House resilience strategy defines and details its four tenets of transformation as: prioritize, modernize, distribute, and simplify.

Looking at this through an enterprise resilience lens, here’s our view on what businesses need to understand disruptions, make the most informed decisions, act fast, and remain operational.

• Prioritize: Build a connected view of business dependencies against your most important products or customers. Focus enterprise resilience investments on the business capabilities that matter most to maximize your organization’s return on resilience.
• Modernize: Understand that executives don’t need more alerts. They need immediate understanding of business impact in context to answer questions like: Which business services and customers are impacted? What revenues are at risk? What recovery actions are underway? What decisions require executive intervention? Replace static plans with connected data automation and intelligence to allow them to answer those questions. Treat resilience as an ongoing operating capability versus an annual compliance exercise.
• Distribute: Create a shared service-and-dependency model to provide a governed view of how critical services depend on applications, data, facilities, infrastructure, suppliers and teams. Now, you can avoid the manual scramble that often occurs during disruption.
• Simplify: Take the above steps to respond to disruptions faster and more confidently. Then, continuously update your strategy using operational data as it changes, measure the business impact to learn from new events, and improve your resilience over time.

The time is now for business leaders to take ownership of and invest in enterprise resilience

While the White House has made clear that it sees resilience as a strategic capability, one of our customers recently pointed out that mission-critical organizations shouldn’t make the mistake of operating under the assumption that the U.S. government will step in to help during a crisis.

It’s also important to note that while the current government’s deregulatory posture may remove some compliance requirements, that doesn’t eliminate enterprises’ underlying risk.

This means enterprise resilience rests squarely on the shoulders of business leaders.

Research by my team estimates that the average large enterprise is carrying somewhere between $12 million and $47 million, showing that existing resilience programs clearly aren’t enough. Now is the time for chief executive officers, chief financial officers, chief risk officers, and chief operating officers to align on new enterprise resilience investments.

Because resilience isn’t about having a plan, it’s about confident decision-making and coordinated action. The organizations that embrace and invest in enterprise resilience to make better decisions and act fast when conditions change will build competitive advantage.

Michael Campbell brings more than 35 years of software development and technology experience to his role as CEO of Fusion Risk Management. His exceptional executive management background includes multiple executive leadership roles and board membership positions, as he spent the beginning of his professional career co-founding and developing several successful startups.  Michael received his Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Purdue University and was recognized as a Distinguished Engineering Alumni and Outstanding Aerospace Engineer in 2009.

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