by Brianna Crandall — January 5, 2015—BSI, the U.K.-based business standards company, recently published a landmark standard that provides an overview of resilience, describing the foundations required and explaining how to build resilience. It therefore deals with an organization’s capacity to anticipate, respond and adapt—which BSI reminds could be crucial to its survival.
BS 65000 Guidance for Organizational Resilience provides guidance on achieving enhanced organizational resilience and articulates the benefits of doing so. Currently, standards exist within the crisis management and business continuity management arenas that impact on the overall governance of an organization. This standard can help to enhance these practices by integration of the disciplines that are essential for resilience. BS 65000 references other activities including risk management, horizon scanning and change management.
Bringing coherence to these disciplines and activities is a very important and growing issue for all businesses to include within their essential business behaviors, says BSI. The initiatives should mesh with an effective strategic facilities management plan. To demonstrate the global value of this standard, ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is developing ISO 22316—Organizational Resilience, which is due to publish in 2016, and BS 65000 is providing the basis for this standard.
The benefits of resilience are clear, says BSI, and enable organizations to:
- Adapt/improvise successfully to unforeseen and disruptive changing environments
- Gain a competitive edge by identifying gaps and taking advantage of opportunities
- Be more agile and innovative by learning from trends
- Reduce costs and increase efficiency by avoiding potential pitfalls
- Obtain a better understanding of risks and opportunities
- Preserve and improve a company’s reputation by being seen as vigilant and robust
- Engender trust among external clients and internally among staff
- Cultivate a culture of shared purpose and values
Anne Hayes, head of market development for Governance and Risk at BSI, commented, “Organizations that are resilient behave in a very specific way and have long understood what this means to their long-term success. They take a proactive approach to governing themselves and have pinpointed the importance of being forewarned. BS 65000 can work alongside their existing risk, crisis and business continuity management strategies to provide a solid defense against weathering a tough business climate.”
BS 65000:
- Offers basic tools for assessing the resilience measures of an organization
- Works as a guidance document in an advisory capacity with principles outlined
- Contains a maturity model for measurement
- Includes questions organizations can use to assess their resilience measures
- Enables upper-level management to describe a strategy for organizational resilience that identifies benefits, behaviors of resilient organizations
BSI notes that a wide range of experts and representatives from a cross-section of industry, trade bodies and academia were involved in the consensus-based process for developing the standard.
