Business Continuity Managers See Their Roles Expanded to Focus on Longer-Term and More Strategic Elements of Resilience
The BCI has launched the BCI Continuity & Resilience Report 2023, which examines the state of business continuity and resilience within organisations. The report, sponsored by Riskonnect, provides an in-depth overview of the sector through survey responses and structured interviews with senior resilience professionals.
This year’s statistics show a continuation of the ‘definitional confusion’ highlighted in last year’s report, with half of organisations yet to internally define or even understand the differences between business continuity and resilience.
While the introduction of operational resilience regulation has helped financial services organisations to better understand how operational resilience and business continuity can work together to ensure organisational resilience, there are significant differences in definitions between sectors. However, definitional confusion is not a barrier to building resilient practices, with most organisations integrating resilient processes as common practice and one in four now having dedicated resilience teams. This demonstrates a growing commitment to resilience as a function.
In addition, three-quarters of respondents report that responsibility for resilience lies with the C-suite, in line with best practice. This shows a growing understanding of the importance of embedding resilience at all levels of an organisation. In some cases (6.8%) this means shared responsibility between members of the C-suite, while the majority say that either the Chief Executive Officer (26.5%), Chief Operations Officer (12.9%) or Chief Risk Officer (12.9%) has ultimate responsibility.
Business Continuity and Resilience Professionals: A Changing Role?
As the role expands, practitioners recognise that their roles now have a more strategic remit. This year, on average, practitioners rated their role as 53% strategic and 47% operational. This follows the trend seen in previous years of practitioners becoming trusted advisors on longer-term resilience issues, and shows that the focus of practitioners is expanding from traditional operational tasks (developing plans, conducting risk assessments and ensuring that services can be restored after a disruption) to include strategic planning responsibilities. This includes, for example, gathering information on emerging risks and providing proactive guidance on strategic actions that organisations should take to improve their resilience. In support of this, 41.9% of business continuity managers have either recently had their job title changed to include ‘resilience’ or expect this to happen soon.
New role, new skills
As the role expands, so too do the attributes required by resilience professionals to perform in their roles. In recent years, people skills have become an important part of the catalogue of skills required. Resilience managers now need to be able to ‘make things happen’ (76.8%), build relationships (76.4%) and be empowering (74.6%), while also being empathetic (73.9%). This year, however, we see a return of some of the more traditional skills to the top of the table, suggesting that the profession is keen to ensure that tried and tested rules and principles remain the backbone of the industry. Indeed, in 2023, being ‘process-oriented’ (83.5%) and ‘a good planner’ (79.0%) are the top two attributes of a resilience manager. Furthermore, as the skills field becomes more complex and competitive, the importance of education from an academic (71.3%) and professional (67.4%) perspective has shifted to the top half of the table this year.
Increased resources for business continuity and resilience programmes
The level of resources devoted to business continuity and resilience has long been a concern for professionals in the field, but major disruptions in recent years have highlighted the importance of these functions to those who hold the purse strings. Indeed, the report finds that two-thirds of organisations have seen an increase in financial and resource support over the past year. In addition, more than 80% said that the importance of having a business continuity and resilience programme has been recognised as the sector has become more visible.
Commenting on the report’s findings, Rachael Elliott, Head of Thought Leadership, BCI, said: “The pandemic prompted many organisations to review their business continuity and resilience processes, with many finding that processes and procedures were not aligned with current working practices and the ever-increasing risk landscape. As a result, many organisations moved to more agile working environments, ‘lite’ business continuity plans and better collaborative practices. Now that these ‘new’ ways of working have become embedded, the report shows that professionals are now moving to formalise these processes; ensuring that processes and planning are in place to support them. However, the key finding of this report is the expansion of the role of professionals into an exciting new area, introducing techniques such as longer term horizon scanning, strategic advice to the board on resilience, and seeking to ensure that external stakeholders are protected in the event of an incident”.
Brian Zawada, Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at Riskonnect, added: “It has been an honour to work with the BCI on this important study. The report demonstrates the continued maturation of our profession and the business continuity and resilience discipline in general. I believe that many of the conclusions drawn from the input of the survey participants can influence the way we think about preventing and preparing for disruption, thereby increasing the value we deliver in the next calendar year and beyond.”
