Why Aligning Business and Technology is the Foundation of Resilience

As we begin our deep dive into the resilience-first strategy, it’s essential to start with aligning business and technology. In today’s digital landscape, the pace of technological change is relentless. This evolution means that technology is deeply embedded in nearly every aspect of business operations, influencing everything from day-to-day workflows to long-term strategy. However, without intentional alignment, this reliance on technology can introduce vulnerabilities and create silos within organizations that make them less adaptable and resilient. A resilience-first strategy requires that business and technology work together seamlessly, with

1. aligned priorities
2. shared objectives
3. coordinated risk management.

In this section, we’ll explore practical steps to achieve alignment, highlighting the specific tactics, which make it possible to effectively integrate technology supporting and enabling critical business processes.

Conduct a Joint Risk Assessment

The first step in aligning business and technology is to understand the risks each area faces. Business operations and technology departments often conduct their own risk assessments, focusing on issues specific to their domains—whether operational disruptions, market shifts, cybersecurity threats, or data breaches. However, conducting these assessments in isolation will lead to gaps in understanding how a risk in one area might impact another.

To bridge this gap:

• Bring Together Cross-Functional Teams: Organize risk assessment sessions that include representatives from both business and IT teams. By bringing these perspectives together, you’ll identify dependencies between operational and technological functions that might otherwise go unnoticed. Remember someone’s perception may not be someone else’s perceptive.
• Map Interdependencies and Points of Failure: Document how each critical business function relies on specific technological resources and vice versa. Identify points of single failure, or existing workarounds. Then make plans to address and mitigate these vulnerabilities.
• Prioritize Risks Based on Business Impact: Aligning business and technology risk assessments helps prioritize actions based on the severity of a disruption. For instance, if a certain risk to a server impacts a revenue-generating process, it should receive higher priority in resilience planning.

This shared assessment process builds a collective understanding of risks, which in turn strengthens the organization’s ability to respond to disruptions, which might simultaneously impact multiple areas.

Define Shared Objectives

Alignment is more than understanding risk—it’s about setting a common purpose and understanding how each team’s efforts support the resilience of the entire organization. Misaligned objectives will lead to conflicting, if not competing priorities, resulting in wasted resources and inefficiencies, which will hinder resilience efforts.

To create shared objectives:

• Establish Core Resilience Goals Across Departments: These might include goals such as maintaining continuous service availability, ensuring data integrity, and upholding regulatory compliance. Once defined, these goals may serve as a unifying mission, which guides all departments.
• Tie Technology Goals to Business Outcomes: When evaluating technology initiatives, consider how they directly support business objectives. For instance, instead of viewing cybersecurity solely as an IT responsibility, recognize its role in maintaining customer trust, protecting revenue.  and the preserving the organization’s reputation.
• Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Encompassing Both Domains: Establish KPIs reflecting both business and technology goals. Examples might include metrics for service uptime, customer satisfaction, and data security incidents. By tracking these KPIs, you create a continuous feedback loop, which helps monitor alignment and guides course corrections when needed.

Defining and pursuing shared objectives helps reinforce a resilience culture, which is focused on outcomes, which matter most to the entire organization, reducing friction arising from siloed priorities.

Implement Cross-Functional Training

One of the biggest challenges to aligning business and technology is a lack of mutual understanding. Cross-functional training is an effective solution, ensuring that both business and technology teams are well-versed in each other’s priorities, tools, and processes.

Practical steps to make this happen include:

• Educate Business Leaders on Technology Dependencies and Risks: Give business leaders a clear understanding of the critical role that technology plays in daily operations and the potential risks involved. For example, demonstrating how a DDoS attack might affect customer-facing services, helps build support for necessary cybersecurity investments.
• Train IT Teams on Business Objectives and Customer Impact: Help IT staff understand how their work directly impacts business goals and customer experience. If technology teams understand which services are customer-facing or revenue-generating, they will prioritize responses in line with business priorities.
• Establish Ongoing Learning Opportunities: Create regular sessions where business and IT teams exchange updates on relevant challenges, projects, and goals. This includes monthly meetings, joint training workshops, or even job rotation programs for deeper immersion.

Through cross-functional training, you foster a mutual understanding that will enhance collaboration and make responses to disruptions more efficient and well-coordinated.

Create Scenario-Based Response Plans

Preparedness is a cornerstone of resilience, and scenario-based response planning is essential for handling potential disruptions, which will affect business and technology alike. These response plans are designed to provide step-by-step guidance for mitigating disruptions based on specific threat scenarios.

To make these response plans actionable:

• Develop Scenarios that Reflect Real-World Threats: Premise scenarios on realistic threats identified in your joint risk assessment. For example, a healthcare organization might develop plans for a ransomware attack, a data breach, or a supply chain interruption of critical medical supplies.
• Outline Roles and Responsibilities Clearly: Every scenario-based response plan should include detailed instructions on who does what, from communication protocols to technical remediation steps. This approach prevents delays and confusion during an actual event.
• Run Simulations and Test the Plans: Regularly practice these response plans through simulations or tabletop exercises. Testing helps identify areas for improvement and ensures that both business and IT teams are confident in their roles and responsibilities.

These scenario-based plans equip teams to respond decisively and collaboratively, minimizing the potential impact on business continuity.

Establish Clear Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs)

Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) are essential for prioritizing the restoration of business-critical functions after a disruption. They provide a time-based measure of acceptable downtime, helping teams focus on restoring essential services promptly.

Here’s how to set RTOs, which align with business needs:

• Determine Business-Critical Processes and Dependencies: Work with both business and IT teams to identify which processes must be restored immediately to minimize disruption. Assign RTOs to these processes based on their business impact.
• Coordinate RTOs Across Departments: Ensure that RTOs are consistent and logical across departments. For instance, if a business unit requires that critical data be available within one hour of a disruption, IT must allocate resources accordingly.
• Document RTOs in All Relevant Resilience Plans: Ensure that RTOs are prominently included in incident response, business continuity, and disaster recovery plans. Teams must regularly review and validate these objectives to ensure they remain relevant.

Setting and coordinating RTOs ensures that everyone has a clear understanding of priorities during a disruption, streamlining efforts and enhancing resilience across the organization.

Aligning Business and Technology for Resilience

Aligning business and technology is the bedrock of a resilience-first strategy, creating an integrated approach where both areas are not only prepared for potential threats but also optimized to support each other. By conducting joint risk assessments, defining shared objectives, implementing cross-functional training, developing scenario-based response plans, and establishing RTOs, organizations, will lay a strong foundation for resilience.

In the next article, we will delve into the second pillar of resilience: anticipating disruptions. Building upon the alignment achieved here, we will explore how proactive risk management and scenario planning further fortify an organization’s ability to withstand and adapt to change. With alignment as the anchor, organizations are positioned to tackle future challenges with confidence, agility, and unity.