What does business continuity mean in your enterprise?

A common thread that’s emerged in our conversations with potential clients is that Enterprises need better visibility in order to deal with newly hybrid workforces, IT transformation and decentralisation.

The questions we’ve been asking as we construct our Business Continuity Dashboards are connecting IT with business outcomes in a way that makes sense – particularly under current circumstances – but that doesn’t seem to have been done before.

These are questions like: If productivity is down, is it because end users are experiencing network issues? If you’re not delivering goods on time, which part of your system is slowing you down? How does it impact your bottom line when absentee rates surge? Are you still able to do what you do as a business at pre-pandemic efficiency levels? Where are the tools and indicators to help you see all of this information?

The answer, very often, lies in data that you’re already collecting in one form or another. After all, it’s information that’s crucial to your top-level decision making. But in most organisations reporting covers discrete areas, with no cohesive view of how each area is performing in relation to any other. The data is not live, it’s tricky to access and it’s potentially hard to interpret.

We set ourselves the challenge of taking the data that you care about from spreadsheets and isolated role-specific applications and visualising it in live dashboards. We can enrich these with data that you’re not yet collecting if there are gaps in visibility, with the end goal of making business continuity measurable.

IT
We are all used to the traditional performance and availability monitoring of the critical services that users need to perform their jobs.

However, for a more complete picture of how well the business is performing… we can also monitor (for example) the network and user interactions of e-mail and telephony systems and score all of these along with business performance metrics like enquiries, deliveries and invoicing etc… We will bring all of this information together to confirm that the business is achieving its performance and productivity goals and then measure how consistently this is being upheld with SLA scoring and dashboarding.

Productivity
What you choose to measure here will be specific to your Enterprise, but the aim is to measure how well your people and processes are performing. Indicators and metrics, you might want to monitor range from:

• IP telephony – Are sales staff making as many phone calls as they would if they were in the office? How many customer service agents are logged in?
• HR applications – How many employees are off sick or on annual leave?
• Supply chain logistics – How long can your hospital function without delivery of PPE?
• Manufacturing – Are IT failures in quality control slowing down production?

Finances
Financial dashboards would be available only via secure, role-based access to select stakeholders, but it makes sense to gather and visualise this data in one place. It means you can easily see how well your business is performing financially and what factors could be having an impact. For example, vastly longer lead time visible in the productivity metrics may be affecting your stock price.

Your top-level business continuity score – indicating the overall health of your Enterprise – is informed by a combination of data from all three areas. We’re here to give senior leadership teams confidence in their ability to track business continuity through live data feeds and an easy-to-understand dashboard interface.

Download your copy of the business continuity brochure here and book a free demo of the dashboards.

Call us today on 01782 752 369
KedronUK, Kern House, Stone Business Park, Stone, Staffordshire ST15 0TL