There has been a long-running and sometimes heated debate within the business continuity profession about how business continuity and operational resilience fit together. After more than three decades as the relatively undisputed method of ensuring that organizations can effectively respond to and manage disruption, the emergence of operational resilience has challenged business continuity’s leading position.
The meme that operational resilience is simply business continuity ‘done well’ was often quoted while the business continuity profession started to come to terms with operational resilience, but the profession seems to have clearly moved on from this view.
The BCI Operational Resilience Report 2024, published on 22nd May, provides the views of 202 business continuity and resilience professionals from around the world and finds that more than three-quarters of these (76.4%) ‘strongly’ or ‘very strongly’ agree that ‘Business continuity is a part of operational resilience; it supports resilience’. This is a substantial increase from the same report in 2023, where two-thirds (66.5%) of respondents expressed the same view.
The prevalent and increasing view seems to be that business continuity is a supportive aspect of operational resilience, with the latter being the over-arching discipline.
This viewpoint was expressed in November 2023 by the BCBS (Basel Committee on Banking Supervision) which stated in a supervisory newsletter that ‘operational resilience is more than just business continuity’.
A survey by Resilience Forward sought to understand whether resilience professionals agreed with this statement and the results were clear and very similar to the findings of the BCI report highlighted above.
Three-quarters (76.9%) of respondents to the Resilience Forward survey agreed with the statement that operational resilience is more than just business continuity, while only 19.2% disagreed and 3.8% were unsure.
ChatGPT has also picked up on this trending viewpoint, with the generative AI chatbot describing business continuity as ‘a subset of operational resilience’.
Does business continuity have a future?
Business continuity is far from being replaced by operational resilience – the prevailing view seems to be that business continuity is an essential aspect of a wider operational resilience programme.
Business continuity’s focus on business impacts and the continuation of business processes through periods of disruption is a vital aspect of operational resilience: helping to ensure the availability of important business services and ensuring that impact tolerances can be met.
While it is clear that business continuity can be carried out by an organization separately and without any reference to operational resilience, as has been the case for many years, it seems that an effective operational resilience programme is not possible without business continuity – it is an essential piece of the operational resilience jigsaw.
So, business continuity is here to stay – there seems little doubt about that – but where next for this profession? Maybe what business continuity professionals need to do now is to concentrate on defining and cementing business continuity’s position within operational resilience, rather than attempting to resist this role?
The author
David Honour is editor of Resilience Forward.
