As the coronavirus wreaks havoc on organisations worldwide, Gartner has suggested that leaders examine a five-phase approach that could strengthen their resilience and contribute to business continuity.
“Companies tend to have traditional business continuity strategies and plans that focus on the continuity of the resources and processes but omit the business model,” said Daniel Sun, research VP at Gartner, in a note this week.
“However, the business model itself can be a threat to continuity of operations in external events, such as the global outbreak of COVID-19.”
Since digital technologies now influence every aspect of business models, the CIO can play a vital role in ensuring uninterrupted operations, said Sun. Gartner predicts that by 2021, one-fifth of the CIOs who drive the process of raising business model resilience to enable continuity during the pandemic, will be promoted to the senior leadership team.
For example, augmented analytics can be used to identify and address customer needs and pain points, strengthen relationships with existing customers and enhance employee productivity. It may also help with cost reduction.
Sun said CIOs should look upon the pandemic as an opportunity to increase business resilience and lay their foundation to become ‘true business leaders’.
Phase 1: Define the business model
Companies should first focus on their core customers, which are essential to the continuity of their operations. Questions should be asked around the customers’ needs as well the business’ relationship with them, value propositions, the business capabilities and financial models.
Although CIOs don’t normally lead the process of defining their firms’ business model, Sun suggests they discuss these questions with other business leaders, with a view to modifying the status quo.
Phase 2: Identify uncertainties
This step can be carried out through a strength, weakness, opportunity and threat (SWOT) analysis, or by brainstorming.
Gartner says that given the wide range of uncertainties and threats, this step can benefit from a group of participants with diverse backgrounds and interests. Companies should focus on the risks that the uncertainty poses to the components of the business model.
“CIOs should participate in, or coordinate, the brainstorming sessions to identify any uncertainties from COVID-19 outbreaks,” said Sun. “CIOs can share some of IT’s potential uncertainties and threats, such as issues with IT infrastructure, applications and software systems.”
Phase 3: Assess the impact
Multidisciplinary members should form a project team to assess and quantify the impact of the identified uncertainties. CIOs can provide the potential IT impacts.
Phase 4: Design changes
The team should now begin to develop tentative strategies rather than mulling their feasibility. Executing changes will follow in due course. CIOs and IT should leverage digital technologies and capabilities to facilitate the designed changes.
Phase 5: Execute changes
The decision on which changes to execute should be made by senior leadership teams, who will be guided by the strategies for change defined in the previous phase. Leadership teams should select the strategies they feel are most compelling to implement, which is often based on both economic calculations and intuition.
“Once senior leadership teams select the business and IT change initiatives, CIOs should apply an agile approach in executing the initiatives,” said Sun. “For example, they can form an agile (product) team of multidisciplinary team members, enabling the alignment between business and IT and ensuring delivery speed and quality. In crises such as the COVID-19 outbreak, agility, speed and quality are crucial to enable the continuity of operations.”
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