Exploring Operational Resilience
Summarize
Summary of Exploring Operational Resilience
The Operational Resilience application in ServiceNow provides a unified platform to monitor and enhance your organization’s ability to withstand disruptions across business services and core operational areas. It enables cross-functional teams—including IT, HR, Facilities, Security, Finance, and Risk departments—to gain visibility, automate processes, and manage risks effectively.
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This application complements Business Continuity Management (BCM) by focusing on proactive resilience monitoring and service delivery assurance, whereas BCM concentrates on planning and responding to disruptions at the business process level.
Operational Resilience Workflow
The application supports a continuous four-stage workflow that guides resilience managers through the lifecycle of managing adverse events:
- Anticipate: Identify critical services, people, and processes using what-if scenario analysis to prioritize protection efforts based on business and risk context.
- Prevent: Establish automated preventative controls and continuous monitoring to reduce risks and ensure smooth operations with targeted incident response.
- Respond/Recover: Utilize pre-approved and tested continuity plans to respond effectively, reduce risks, and shorten recovery times during incidents.
- Adapt: Learn from past adverse events by collecting and assessing data to improve future resilience measures and operational performance.
Key Benefits and Features
- Analyze business service importance and impact tolerance to prioritize resilience efforts.
- Perform scenario analyses to evaluate potential risks and outcomes within the Operational Resilience workspace.
- Self-attest business services to maintain up-to-date certification of operational readiness.
- Create and manage issues, change requests, incidents, outages, and operational vulnerabilities directly within the workspace.
- Enhanced user experience with the Coral theme as the default for Business Continuity Workspace, offering a modern, brand-neutral interface and an optional dark mode for web and mobile.
Roles and Access
Users with Operational Resilience IRM Pro or BCM Pro licenses can access associated reports, charts, and data relevant to their roles, ensuring appropriate visibility and control over resilience and continuity management activities.
Practical Value for ServiceNow Customers
By leveraging the Operational Resilience application, ServiceNow customers can unify resilience efforts across departments, automate risk management processes, and maintain continuous service delivery despite disruptions. This holistic approach improves decision-making, response times, and allows organizations to adapt and strengthen their operational posture over time.
The Operational Resilience application provides a complete view of your operational resilience status including business service details, entities, and the status of your core business areas.
Operational Resilience overview
The Operational Resilience application helps your organization to achieve a uniform vision and build resilience across different business functions. By using the Operational Resilience application on one platform, various teams can monitor the health of their services in one place.
- IT departments can automate their processes and track the availability and functioning of the failover systems of their applications.
- HR departments can have clear visibility on the market trends, resource pools, and retention risks.
- Facilities departments can focus on implementing the major improvements that help you to manage your day-to-day business operations with low maintenance.
- Security departments can address the physical vulnerabilities and cyberthreats efficiently.
- Finance teams can manage the contractual issues, supply chain risks, and overall finances effectively.
- Risk teams can analyze their potential risks and mitigate their service impact on the business operations.
Operational Resilience and Business Continuity Management
Operational Resilience defines the steps that an organization must proactively take to prevent any operational disruptions. Business Continuity Management implements an approach wherein it builds a plan to respond quickly to a disruption that may impact your entire organization.
Operational Resilience is about proactively monitoring the resilience statistics and ensuring that the service delivery happens at any cost. Business Continuity Management is about analyzing the business disruptions, preparing a disaster recovery plan, and responding to a crisis event at the business process level.
As stated earlier, Operational Resilience provides a clear understanding of your company's operational resilience statistics on the dashboard. It includes the statistics for Business Continuity Management, Risks, Controls, Service statistics, and so on. On the other hand, Business Continuity Management operates at the business process level.
Roles installed with BCM Pro and IRM Pro licenses
Users, managers, and administrators with an Operational Resilience IRM Pro license can now access the associated reports, charts, and data. Similarly, those with an Operational Resilience BCM Pro license can also access their respective reports, charts, and data.
For more information on the updated roles, see Roles installed with Operational Resilience.
Operational Resilience workflow
The Operational Resilience application provides a continuous four-stage workflow that helps your resilience managers and administrators to achieve your organization’s safety and well-being. You can prepare for and cope with the adverse events by anticipating, preventing, recovering from, and adapting to such events. The stages of operational resilience are shown in the following example.
Anticipate: When disastrous events happen, it is not always obvious which services, people, and processes are critical. Organizational silos, poor data, and different tools can impede your understanding of risks and cross-business dependencies. A lack of prioritization and planning can mean imprecise decision making.
To overcome these challenges, the Operational Resilience application helps you to perform a what-if scenario analysis to better plan for best, worst, and expected outcomes. The application helps you to prepare for what you must protect and identify the areas to prioritize, according to your business and risk context.
Prevent: Most operational procedures are designed for efficiency rather than for risk and compliance. Businesses often over-rely on the manual corrective controls, rather than the automated preventative controls. Early warning of risks or adverse events can be thwarted by manual processes and fragmented data. Such practices can cripple your response to disastrous events.
The Operational Resilience application can guide you through establishing sufficient controls that reduce the likelihood of potential problems in time to mitigate them effectively. With risk and compliance activities incorporated into your daily work, operations run smoothly with fewer efforts. Intelligent processes and policies help you unlock new efficiencies. Continuous monitoring triggers an immediate and targeted incident response.
Respond/Recover: Many businesses are organized in such a way that they are unable to respond to adverse events quickly or safely. Communication internally, or with vendors and suppliers is poor. Split-second decisions can worsen the situation, especially when information is incomplete or outdated.
Continuity plans that are created using the Operational Resilience application can help you prevent an out-of-control escalation of an incident. A pre-approved and tested recovery plan prepares you to respond to the situations effectively, reduces the risks, and improves the recovery time.
Adapt: Operational resilience means you can quickly and easily bounce back from disasters. However, when these events occur, they are not often seen as learning opportunities. But they are. If you look at them in that way, you have a chance to improve your protective measures and respond effectively to the next event. Learning from these events and adapting can lead to minimized impacts and speedier recovery.
Adverse events, such as fire, extreme weather, pandemics, or data breaches, offer lessons about what could work better. The Operational Resilience application can help you collect data, assess results, and feed conclusions back to your teams. Visibility to the past provides business leaders with a vision of better operational performance in the future.
Operational Resilience benefits
The Operational Resilience application provides the following benefits:
| Benefits | Features | Users |
|---|---|---|
| Analyze the importance and impact tolerance of a business service. | Performing Importance and impact tolerance assessment | Operational Resilience managers and users |
| Perform a scenario analysis in Operational Resilience workspace. | Conducting a scenario analysis | Operational Resilience managers and users |
| Self-attest the business services in Operational Resilience workspace. | Certifying services using self-attestation | Operational Resilience managers and users |
| Add an issue, change request, incident, and outage in Operational Resilience workspace. | Creating or adding an issue | Operational Resilience managers and users |
| Add or remove an operational vulnerability in Operational Resilience workspace. | Managing Operational vulnerability | Operational Resilience managers and users |
Coral theme
Coral is now the default theme for Business Continuity Workspace. This theme provides a fresh look and feel, featuring brand-neutral illustrations to enhance your user experience. A dark theme option is available for web and mobile experiences.