The success of a resilience program largely depends on strong support from top leadership, confirms the A Year in the World of Resilience report. When senior leadership takes the lead in developing and managing resilience initiatives, it ensures these efforts are effectively governed, measured, monitored, and continuously improved for long-term success.
Research for the report shows the top areas where senior management have been involved either by directly managing an area or by providing strategic oversight of it.
Overall, cyber resilience was the top area with senior management involvement. This was the case in 80.8% of surveyed organizations, with this area being directly managed by senior management in 25.7% of organizations and in 55.1% of organizations senior management provided strategic oversight rather than direct management of this area.
This was very closely followed by regulatory requirements, with senior management involvement at 80%, 41.8% of organizations having this area directly managed by senior management and 38.2% where senior management provided strategic oversight.
Other top areas included:
- Business continuity: 74.8% (18% directly managed by senior management, 56.8% strategic oversight)
- Crisis management 74.7% (32.4% directly managed by senior management, 42.3% strategic oversight)
- New technology decisions 69.1% (26.4% directly managed by senior management, 42.7% strategic oversight)
- Operational resilience 68.5% (19.8% directly managed by senior management, 48.7% strategic oversight)
It is interesting to see the discrepancy between the results for business continuity and operational resilience. Given the push by regulators to ensure top management involvement in operational resilience you would expect the latter to have at least an equivalent figure to business continuity. While senior management involvement in directly managing these areas is similar (18% for business continuity and 19.8% for operational resilience) senior management strategic oversight of business continuity is significantly higher, at 56.8% compared to 48.7% for operational resilience.
Senior management’s approach to pandemic planning is a disappointing area. Less than 5 years on from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems that senior management in many organizations has returned to its pre-pandemic complacency. Despite a future pandemic being a virtual certainty and also the warning bells currently being rung about H5N1, less than half (42.2%) of respondents to the report’s survey saw senior management involved in this area. 11.9% of senior managers directly managed this area; and 30.3% had strategic oversight. This was also the aspect of the survey which generated by far the highest number of responses for there being minor interest (20.2%) and no interest (7.3%) from senior management in this area. At a total of 27.5% this level of interest was almost twice the next lowest area, which was supply chain resilience at 15.4%.
