As the frequency and severity of corporate crises continue to increase, organizations are focusing on operational resilience more than ever before.
Consider a data breach, one of the most common threats faced by a corporation. A study by IBM and the Ponemon Institute found that the average total cost of a data breach in 2017 exceeds $3 million. The research also found that a company that has experienced a data breach has a nearly 28 percent chance of being breached again in the following two years.
These startling statistics are a good reminder that lack of preparation for a crisis can be catastrophic to many companies. Unfortunately, a data breach—or an IT outage, supply chain problem, natural disaster, incident of terrorism, or other crisis—can strike anyone at any time. How can an organization like yours improve operational resilience in the face of such dynamic threats?
Digital Tools to Improve Resilience
For corporations trying to prepare for a wide variety of crises, new digital platforms are often one of the keys to optimizing resilience. Today’s crisis landscape contains fast-moving, costly, and even deadly threats. Leveraging digital technology can help you to plan for and mitigate these crises and, when they do occur, can streamline communication and improve crisis response.
Tools such as a mobile crisis platform digitally enable your organization to prepare for and respond better to an emerging situation. A mobile platform operationalizes your crisis and business continuity plans, transforming your lengthy hard-copy documents into functional digital playbooks that enable users to drill down according to their role and location and the specific situation.
A mobile crisis solution helps improve operational resilience in several key ways:
1. Faster Response Times
The top benefit of a crisis app is that it enables you to quickly activate your team the moment a crisis strikes. You’ll no longer waste valuable minutes calling people on their office lines or sending emails that may go unread. Instead, an app lets you send alerts directly to your team’s mobile phones, empowering them to react quicker. This can help to improve operational resilience by lessening the severity of a crisis event, because your people are better equipped to handle it right away.
2. Improved Communication
A mobile crisis app also includes capabilities for real-time alerts, incident reports, and in-crisis polling, all of which significantly improve communication among your team members. This helps to streamline both crisis preparation and response, because individual stakeholders can more readily share information and keep each other updated.
3. Less Downtime
One of the best ways to prevent, mitigate, or rectify a crisis is for all stakeholders to have immediate, easy access to the information they need. A mobile app makes crisis, business continuity, and other relevant plans available on each person’s mobile device, so they always have instant access to valuable information. Each user can quickly find relevant plans for each specific crisis, drill down to interactive content such as checklists and flowcharts, and find key contacts from directories categorized by situation, location, and event.
Having such valuable information available at any time helps to minimize downtime from all manner of incidents. Stakeholders are better equipped to react to potential incidents or in-progress crises, which means they can help get key business functions up and running and lessen overall downtime, preventing crises from spiraling out of control.
4. Streamlined Return to Normalcy
With any incident, getting operations back to normal is vital for a full recovery. When your team isn’t armed with the information it needs and can’t communicate effectively, people are more likely to panic or make mistakes. This hinders progress in your recovery efforts and can make even smaller incidents that much worse.
However, when everyone is armed with the information they need and can easily keep each other updated, they can react quickly and confidently and help the rest of the organization return to normal without further incident.
Digitize Your Resilience Efforts
Facing a rising tide of potential crises, it’s important for organizations like yours to keep up with the rapidly evolving nature of threats. Today, many incidents occur and spread incredibly quickly, which requires an equally agile approach to ensuring operational resilience.
Digitizing your crisis management and business continuity plans using a mobile platform can transform the way your organization handles problematic events. By arming your stakeholders with the information they need and significantly improving their communication capabilities, you empower your team to minimize the impact of each incident and improve resilience across the board.
