BSI publishes organizational resilience standard

New landmark standard provides guidance on achieving enhanced organizational resilience

THE British Standards Institution (BSI) has published BS 65000 Guidance for Organizational Resilience, a landmark standard that provides an overview of resilience, describing the foundations required and explaining how to build resilience. It deals with an organization’s capacity to anticipate, respond and adapt – which could be crucial to its survival.

BS 65000 provides guidance on achieving enhanced organizational 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 organization. BS 65000 is designed to help enhance these practices by integration of the disciplines that are essential for resilience. It references other activities including risk management, horizon scanning and change management.

Bringing coherence to these disciplines and activities is an important and growing issue for all businesses to include within their essential business behaviours. To demonstrate the global value of this standard, ISO (International Organization for Standardization) is developing ISO 22316 – Organizational Resilience, which is due to be published in 2016, and BS 65000 is providing the basis for this standard.

BSI says the benefits of resilience are clear and allow organizations 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 among external clients and internally among staff
• Cultivate a culture of shared purpose and values.

Anne Hayes, head of market development for governance and risk at BSI, said: ‘Organizations 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.’

What BS 65000 does:

• It allows upper-level management to describe a strategy for the organizational resilience which identifies benefits, behaviours of resilient organizations
• It offers basic tools for assessing the resilience measures of an organization
• As a guidance document it works in an advisory capacity with principles outlined
• Contains a maturity model for measurement
• Includes questions organizations can use to assess their resilience measures.