Plan for Resilience: a Guide for Managing Disruption

As business conditions remain uncertain in 2021,modern organizations must thoughtfully consider how they will adapt.Unpredictable events like the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated economic turbulencehave reshaped business landscapes in a way that underscores the importance fororganizations to build plans that will withstand all types of disruption.

In reality, many organizations were caught flat footedby the COVID-19 pandemic. With economic and regulatory environments changingovernight, many organizations did not have the processes or technologies inplace to respond quickly enough to survive. In a world defined by such highuncertainty, it has become clear that a manual, scattershot or siloed approachto planning and analysis is no longer sufficient.

How to planfor resilience

To successfully plan for resilience,organizations must find ways to pivot and adapt quickly. This requires a highlevel of agility based on continuous planning utilizing smarter, data-driveninsights. In order to perform continuous planning, organizations mustorchestrate a convergence of the elements that make up the entire analyticsjourney, from data prep and exploration all the way through to reporting anddashboarding. Organizations must invest in a new holistic approach that bringstogether planning, analytics governance, risk and compliance (GRC).

When organizations take an integrated approach toplanning, analytics and GRC, all of their data can be leveraged toward creatinga feedback loop that informs present and future operations. Business leaderscan then automate tedious and labour-intensive tasks like data collection,aggregation and cleansing through the use of AI. This empowers them to spendmore time on value-added work and enables them to make better-informed businessdecisions. Leaders will start to see shifts on the horizon, allowing them tomake predictive, data-driven pivots before those shifts even occur.

Four key components of this new integrated planningapproach can be represented as the four A's:

1. Agility

Smarter organizations will automate data explorationand visualization for faster, more flexible analysis. They will conductwhat-if scenarios to see the impact on decisions before making them. Theywill also work to integrate their departmental data, allowing them to accesshigh-quality data culled from across the entire organization, breaking downplanning silos.

2. Accuracy

A unified governance approach enables AI-powered andself-service data discovery, visualization and reporting, with risk andcompliance efforts integrated into the same environment. This reduces bias anduncovers patterns buried deep within the data. The better your data andpredictive capabilities are, the greater your forecast reliability will be.

3. Affordability

Bringing all of these components together generatesmassive year-over-year cost savings at the operational level, resulting in theachievement of a stronger strategic position.

4. Anywhere

Leaders across the organization can participate inplanning and analysis from wherever they sit, both organizationally andgeographically, with appropriate governance controls.

Learn moreabout IBM's suite of tools to help plan for resilience at CDW.ca/IBM