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Today’s interconnected world makes global crises more likely. COVID-19 has highlighted a new kind of resiliency — Digital Resiliency, necessary for enterprises to survive and thrive during such crises. Digital Resiliency is a company’s ability to rapidly adapt to disruptions by leveraging digital capabilities to restore business operations and capitalise on the changed conditions. IDC published a formal framework earlier this year along with several reports and surveys outlining best practices for Digital Resiliency in Asia and globally. IDC’s latest report on Digital Resiliency: The Role of Data, Analytics and Artificial Intelligence builds upon the earlier framework and takes a closer look at the role of data, analytics and AI in enabling an organisation’s crisis response and supporting digital resiliency in the future.

“The COVID-19 crisis emphasises digitalisation’s role in resiliency, but it has an important side effect — never before has data and the analytical insights it generates, been so critical to enterprise survival,” says Dr. Chris Marshall, Associate Vice President for Data and Analytics at IDC Asia/Pacific.

Companies often rely on their strengths in various organisational dimensions to accelerate out of a crisis, but it is their weaknesses that usually bring them down. Data, analytics and AI are the foundations of a digital technology platform necessary for achieving digital resiliency across ALL dimensions of an organisation — whether it be operations, finance, customers, ecosystem or even its leadership. Shared data, analytics and AI enable C-suite leaders, including the CIO, to accurately assess and quickly respond to changing operating environments

As a crisis unfolds, leaders must change priorities, and with this, their informational demands for data, analytics and AI must shift in lockstep, as summarised below:

Phase 1: Respond and Restore – At this stage, survival is everything! As such, organisations look to their data, analytics and AI to provide fast insights into different dimensional threats across the business and help them prioritise the urgent and important.

Phase 2: Expand and Optimise – Survival is no longer at stake and there is more time to plan and analyse, so data, analytics and AI priorities inevitably shift. Limited investments in remedial fixes are now possible around weaknesses exposed by a crisis. This may include improving financial forecasting, fixing operational issues or supporting remote employee decision making.

Phase 3: Accelerate and Innovate – Data, analytics and AI priorities shift again to adapt to the new business environment engendered by a crisis. Bigger investments become necessary to remain competitive. Typical initiatives include building intelligent customer databases, smart monitoring of partners within supply chains and enterprise data control planes to support business processes and stakeholders.

Digital resiliency is a must for today’s enterprises to survive and thrive during inevitable future crises. Organisations can use this new report to identify weaknesses in their digital resiliency, and how these can be mitigated by data, analytics and AI.

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