Operational Resilience for the Digital Age: Data-Driven Insight Unlocks Solutions

Anticipating Labor Day weekend traffic and delays prompts many drivers to check travel apps such as Waze and INRIX to stake out the quickest route and optimal exit times within minutes. Tesla’s app test for service outages must have been postponed because it certainly was not on this Labor Day checklist. Tesla owners had an “I can’t believe this could happen” reality when their car entry app failed on Monday. Keyless and locked out, many resorted to social media to vent their frustrations. Customer Service lackluster responses drove confidence down instructing drivers to use their physical key, fob or phone key with Bluetooth if they had it. The root cause for app failure remains an unknown error. The situation lasted a few hours and left people stranded across the country. Customer doubt and dissatisfaction raced faster than Tesla’s handling of the app service outage. Does the digital age still require an extra set of car keys or should Tesla consider how operational resilience can start your trip without a glitch?

Resilience Matters: Initiate the Journey

The 2019 PwC Operational Resilience Report spotlights the 5 key drivers for adopting operational resilience practices:

1. Higher customer expectations concerning 24/7 availability

2. Increased sophistication of cyber threats

3. More severe natural disasters and extreme weather events

4. Higher risk linked to internal change failure

5. Increased regulatory scrutiny.

Interestingly, Tesla faltered on the very first one by not meeting customer satisfaction around the clock. Pretty much all organizations are vulnerable to unprecedented disruption. However, for Tesla, a failed app today may mean a failed brand tomorrow. Taking steps to avoid operational risk management must mean taking measures for prevention and organizational back up for when something may go wrong. PwC defines Operational Resilience as “an organization’s ability to protect and sustain the core business services that are key for its clients, both during business as usual and when experiencing operational stress or disruption.” Resilience manifests as a survivor mindset anticipating risks rather than resigning to compliant methods, and then architects how it will present. Investing in operational risk management is a stake in financial stability, business sustainability, customer satisfaction, and safety.

The Challenge: Omnipotent Threats

Operational resilience grows more complex each year. Technology, interconnections, and transparency are the key challenges to designing and maintaining operation resilience. In many cases, companies are relying on outdated, complex IT systems. These silo-landscapes and disconnected processes are extremely risky. An agile, cloud-based IT support system keeps all organizational environments in one place and up to speed. A modern approach parlays interconnections between people, systems, and processes. Transparency creates operational insights for potential risks that foster data-driven decisions. The functional goal of operational resiliency is the continuity of business services. Leadership will have to acknowledge that at any time disruption can unexpectedly occur within a service or department. Yet, ultimately, it is the business itself that needs to be resilient. The 2019 PwC Operational Resilience Report states there are bare minimum requirements for implementing operational resilience. Organizations need to have the following: the ability to quickly adapt to stressful situations, maintain key services to customers, have management retain critical activities, learn from past scenarios to do better, keep training your staff, continue to build communication channels, and perpetuate a proactive culture.

Good News: Start with Process Tempo

Process Tempo garners the IT landscape with data-driven insight to oversee operational resiliency, and it begins with transparency. Process Tempo’s central platform with a graphic node engine uncovers and explores all relative data relationships with every user’s purpose in mind. Disparate data silos will no longer threaten innovation and growth. We begin with the end consumer of data first, making information easier to access and understand. A modern and fast process, Process Tempo focuses on what matters most to achieve operational resilience for you. Tesla learned their lesson.