Business standards organisation, BSI has published BS 65000 Guidance for Organisational Resilience, designed to provide an overview of resilience, describing the foundations required and explaining how to build resilience. BS 65000 provides guidance on achieving enhanced organisational resilience and articulates the benefits of doing so. Currently, standards exist within the crisis management and business continuity management arenas which impact on the overall governance of an organisation. This standard can help to enhance these practices by integration of the disciplines that are essential for resilience. BS 65000 references other activities including risk management, horizon scanning and change management.

Bringing coherence to these disciplines and activities is a very important and growing issue for all businesses to include within their essential business behaviours. To demonstrate the global value of this standard, ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) is developing ISO 22316 – Organisational Resilience which is due to publish in 2016, and BS 65000 is providing the basis for this standard.

The benefits of resilience are clear and enable organisations to:

• Adapt/improvise successfully to unforeseen and disruptive changing environments
• Gain a competitive edge by identifying gaps and taking advantage of opportunities
• Be more agile and innovative by learning from trends
• Reduce costs and increase efficiency by avoiding potential pitfalls
• Obtain a better understanding of risks and opportunities
• Preserve and improve their reputation by being seen as vigilant and robust
• Engender trust amongst external clients and internally amongst staff
• Cultivate a culture of shared purpose and values

Anne Hayes, head of market development for Governance & Risk at BSI said: “Organisations that are resilient behave in a very specific way and have long understood what this means to their long term success. They take a proactive approach to governing themselves and have pinpointed the importance of being forewarned. BS 65000 can work alongside their existing risk, crisis and business continuity management strategies to provide a solid defence against weathering a tough business climate.”

Goals of BS 65000

• Help upper level management to describe a strategy for the organisational resilience which identifies benefits, behaviours of resilient organisations
• Offers basic tools for assessing the resilience measures of an organisation
• As a guidance document it works in an advisory capacity with principles outlined
• Contains a maturity model for measurement
• Includes questions organisations can use to assess their resilience measures

A wide range of experts and representatives from a cross-section of industry, trade bodies and academia were involved in the consensus-based process for developing the standard.

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