Managing the unexpected.
In today’s economy, better/faster/cheaper is no longer sufficient; your organization or business must also be resilient.
Disruptive events, small or large, natural or manmade, intentional or accidental, continually affect operational capabilities of systems and organizations. Enterprises, large or small, public or private, civilian or federal, continue to invest in a variety of preparedness planning activities to protect their systems, their assets, and their people, including Information Security, IT Disaster Recovery (DR), Business Continuity (BC), Pandemic Planning (PP), Crisis Management (CM) and Emergency Management (EM).
Such recent events as BP’s oil spill, the earthquake/tsunami in Japan, the outage of Sony’s PlayStation network, the failure of Amazon.com’s cloud services, and Verizon’s 4G network outage have demonstrated shortcomings in our fundamental understanding of engineering resilient systems and/or resilient environment in which they operate.
Resilience Engineering is a multi-disciplinary approach for planning, designing, engineering, developing, integrating, testing, implementing, and governing solutions to ensure that an entity (system, organization, enterprise, system-of-systems), and the environment that it operates in, are able to:
- Identify and mitigate operational risks that can lead to disruptions before they occur,
- Prepare for and respond to disruptive events (natural or man-made, accidental or intentional) in a manner that demonstrates command & control of incident response, and
- Recover and restore mission-critical operations following a disruptive event within acceptable time frames.
In other words, an entity designed and engineered for resilience will have the inherent ability to adjust its operations prior, during, and after disruptive events, in ways that allow it to sustain its business operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.
As stated in his April 19, 2011, memorandum, US Secretary of Defense has designated “Engineering Resilient Systems” as one of the seven Department of Defense (DoS) Science and Engineering (S&T) priorities for fiscal years 2013-17. As a result, the DoD, through the office of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, will oversee the development of associated technology roadmaps and coordinate investment in this area to accelerate the development and delivery of capabilities consistent with this priority.
Please contact us to learn more about how we might engineer resilience into your organization and the environment that it operates in.