NEEDHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, resiliency has become a business priority. But traditional approaches struggle to integrate business resiliency with the digital environment in which companies increasingly operate. A new report from International Data Corporation (IDC) presents a digital resiliency framework that shows CEOs, CIOs, and other business leaders how technology can support the entire organization through the different stages of any business crisis. The Digital Resiliency Framework was introduced today at the 56th annual IDC Directions conference, which this year focuses on delivering digital resiliency in a changed world.
"Perhaps the most worrying takeaway from the recent pandemic concerns our lack of preparedness as nations, industries, and companies to deal with similar systemic crises, which are inevitable in our increasingly digital and interconnected world," said Sandra Ng, group vice president for Research at IDC. "Old approaches have proved to be wanting. Nonetheless, organizations must not only respond fast to threats but also learn to opportunistically rise above them. Our new digital world calls out for a new technology-enabled approach to deal with future crises — digital resiliency."
IDC believes that digital resiliency – the ability for an organization to rapidly adapt to business disruptions by leveraging digital capabilities to not only restore business operations but also capitalize on the changed conditions – must be a key objective in every organization's digital transformation (DX) efforts. Digital resiliency is also a central tenet of the future enterprise, IDC's vision for the end state of DX.
IDC's digital resiliency framework includes three phases describing the timeline of enterprise responses to a crisis across a set of six organizational dimensions that are all enabled with a shared technology/digital architecture. Resiliency must be achieved within each of these organizational dimensions, which are interdependent; a weakness in the digital resiliency of one dimension will likely impact other dimensions. Digital resiliency across all these organizational dimensions must be underpinned by an open, integrated, and holistic technology architecture. IDC calls this the DX platform and defines it as a combination of an intelligent core of data analytics, automation and decision support, a wide variety of intelligent applications, and intelligent services, such as governance, DevOps, and orchestration.
For each dimension, IDC has highlighted the enterprise use cases (funded projects) that improve digital resiliency. These use cases can then be mapped to the digital technologies, data, and analytics that support them as well as the business priorities and plans that promote them. This framework enables CXOs to map the business priorities in one or more organizational dimensions to specific use cases that would achieve those goals. Armed with a prioritized use case agenda, CIOs can then propose the relevant investments in the underlying technologies and tools that support those use cases and promote digital resiliency overall.
Using this framework, IDC is conducting survey research on the adoption of various digital resiliency use cases in different enterprises. To the extent that these use cases are present or not provides a measure of digital resiliency for that dimension and, when aggregated, across the entire enterprise. These dimensional measures are then correlated with enterprise-wide self-assessments of digital resiliency to determine which dimensions, and which use cases within a dimension, enterprises should prioritize to become more resilient.
"In any crisis, the response to urgent business requirements must be fast and targeted for maximal impact. Enabling these conversations between CEOs, CIOs, and the broader C-suite with an established framework, in advance, before the next crisis, can make the difference between business failure and a successful future," said Rebecca Segal, group vice president, Worldwide Services at IDC. "We suggest CIOs leverage the IDC digital resiliency framework to prioritize use cases across organizational dimensions and infer the technology requirements and initiatives that best support these priorities."
Understanding the Digital Resiliency Framework is critical not just for organizations working to improve their resiliency, but for their technology partners as well. Recognizing the challenges organizations are looking to solve and demonstrating how technology solutions can help overcome these obstacles will be critical to becoming a trusted digital resiliency partner. IDC's Custom Solutions team can show technology vendors how to better plan, demonstrate, and implement solutions with enterprise organizations that have digital resiliency needs. Learn more at www.idc.com/custom-solutions.
The IDC report, A Digital Resiliency Framework for the Future Enterprise (Doc #US47483421), presents a framework to help CEOs, CIOs, and other business leaders to work together to bring digital acceleration and digital resiliency to the forefront of business strategy, enabling a stronger, more successful, and a more resilient organization to emerge in the years ahead. The framework details the three phases of response to a crisis across six organizational dimensions and identifies use cases and technologies that can support the enterprise through each phase and dimension. Used in conjunction with the resiliency scorecard, the framework is designed to guide organizational planning and investment.
About IDC
International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. With more than 1,100 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. IDC's analysis and insight helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based technology decisions and to achieve their key business objectives. Founded in 1964, IDC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world's leading tech media, data and marketing services company. To learn more about IDC, please visit www.idc.com. Follow IDC on Twitter at @IDC and LinkedIn. Subscribe to the IDC Blog for industry news and insights: http://bit.ly/IDCBlog_Subscribe.
