When it comes to business modeling during and after major disruptions, you can safely assume new regulations are going to come into play. We can simply look to historical precedent surrounding events like the financial meltdown of 2008, and before that SOX which was extremely important in terms of managing risk in terms of data privacy. More recently, things like GDPR and other data privacy regulations have followed. After the impacts of COVID-19 throughout 2020, we can be sure there will also be compliance requirements around business continuity soon to come. Getting a business model in place will help you pass audits of today and the future.
Now is the time
Now is the time to build and enhance your business model. Why? Because mitigation is already top of mind. It is very real for the people within your organization and executives are feeling a tremendous need for it. They are naturally building up institutional knowledge for dealing with future risk to business operations and developing continuity plans. What better time to capture it than when the motivation is clearly there? You have momentum. Acting now will also build confidence within the organization to get through these challenges and share fresh ideas and suggestions. Informed leaders make better decisions. This builds confidence among the stakeholders within an organization whether they be employees, customers, or shareholders. It is important to have the tools described at your fingertips because the downstream effects will be profound.
Process as an Asset
The core concept is turning your processes into valuable assets. We have worked with various analysts over the years who share this idea. Using the business model to identify risk and enable business continuity allow organizations to implement effective controls and mitigate impact, as well as react quickly to shift gears into “Emergency Mode”. This will provide the ability to prioritize and focus on what is critical to keeping the operations of your business running and maintain a positive customer experience. With this information you can now identify ways to augment your business model with technology like automation and mining that can improve efficiency and monitor effects. The result is drawing processes out of that hidden layer. We are so accustomed to examining systems and people, but often overlook the invisible processes. Using this process-centric business model and the other considerations described above, will allow those processes emerge. When they stand on an equal footing with people and systems, true business strategy is allowed to form. The result is quick, decisive action to mitigate the impact of risk to business continuity during major disruptions.
For even more information on this topic, download our latest whitepaper, Dealing with Uncertainty & Disruption with Effective Risk Management.