A Collaborative Resilience Ecosystem

Working Note: This page captures some early thinking and visual experimentation around how business continuity fits within a wider resilience ecosystem. It’s not intended as a definitive model, but as a way of exploring relationships, interfaces, and shared responsibilities across disciplines. 

A Collaborative Resilience Ecosystem: Integrating Emergency Planning, Crisis Management, IT Service Continuity, and Business Continuity

This document outlines a visual representation of how Emergency Planning, Crisis Management, IT Service Continuity, and Business Continuity function as a coordinated and collaborative system during disruptive events. Rather than a hierarchical structure, the visual emphasises the interconnectedness and shared situational awareness crucial for effective organisational resilience. The aim is to illustrate how these disciplines work in concert to minimise impact and ensure swift recovery.

Key Elements and Their Interconnections

Let's break down each element and its relationship to the others:

1. Emergency Planning:

• Focus: Protecting life, safety, and property. Immediate response to incidents like fires, natural disasters, or security breaches.

• Key Activities: Evacuation procedures, first aid, emergency communication, incident containment.

• Collaboration: Emergency Planning provides the initial assessment of the situation, triggering Crisis Management if the event escalates beyond immediate containment. It also informs IT Service Continuity of potential infrastructure damage or service disruptions.

2. Crisis Management:

• Focus: Strategic decision-making, communication, and coordination during a crisis.

• Key Activities: Assessing the impact of the event, activating the crisis management team, communicating with stakeholders (internal and external), making strategic decisions to mitigate the crisis.

• Collaboration: Crisis Management relies on Emergency Planning for initial incident reports and impact assessments. It directs IT Service Continuity to prioritise recovery efforts based on business impact. It works with Business Continuity to implement contingency plans and maintain essential business functions.

3. IT Service Continuity:

• Focus: Ensuring the continued operation of critical IT services during and after a disruption.

• Key Activities: Implementing backup and recovery procedures, activating failover systems, restoring IT infrastructure, communicating with users about service availability.

• Collaboration: IT Service Continuity receives direction from Crisis Management regarding the prioritisation of IT service restoration. It works with Business Continuity to understand the IT dependencies of critical business functions. It informs Crisis Management and Business Continuity about the status of IT service recovery.

4. Business Continuity:

• Focus: Maintaining essential business functions during and after a disruption.

• Key Activities: Activating business continuity plans, relocating staff, implementing workarounds, communicating with customers and suppliers.

• Collaboration: Business Continuity relies on IT Service Continuity to restore critical IT systems. It receives strategic direction from Crisis Management. It provides input to Crisis Management regarding the business impact of the disruption.

5. Shared Situational Awareness:

• Focus: A central repository of information about the incident, its impact, and the status of response and recovery efforts.

• Key Activities: Collecting and disseminating information from all disciplines, maintaining a common operating picture, providing a single source of truth for decision-making.

• Collaboration: All disciplines contribute to and draw from the Shared Situational Awareness hub. This ensures that everyone is working with the same information and that decisions are made based on a complete understanding of the situation.

Benefits of this Approach

This collaborative ecosystem approach offers several benefits:

• Improved Coordination: Emphasising interconnectedness and shared situational awareness leads to better coordination between disciplines.

• Faster Response: Clear roles and responsibilities enable quicker, more effective responses to disruptive events.

• Reduced Impact: Working together, disciplines can minimise disruption and its consequences.

• Enhanced Resilience: Collaboration strengthens the organisation’s ability to withstand future challenges.

• Clear Communication: The visual framework provides a concise way to convey the organisation’s resilience strategy to stakeholders.

In conclusion: This visual methodology provides a structured way to represent resilience disciplines, showing their interconnections, clarifying roles, and fostering shared understanding. By focusing on collaboration, systems thinking, and clarity, it helps organisations anticipate, respond to, and recover from disruptions more effectively.