8B — January 2025 — 2025 Forecast — M id A tlantic Real Estate Journal
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2025 F orecast
By Michael Mullin, Integrated Business Systems Sustaining an operationally resilient business
U
working,” or “HELP! We don’t know what is happening!” This happens every day to a peer of yours in another orga- nization. It might not make the news. To others, it might not even sound like a big deal. But YOU – you can feel that pain. You can imagine what that might be like. You know what could happen to your business’s financial stability if a disaster or disruption prevents your IT infrastructure from doing its job. The biggest risk to any orga- nization is financial risk. How much money can you spend in the face of disaster? Can you
withstand a denied insurance claim? Can you handle an un- expected compliance fine? What if a number of customers cancel at one time? Maybe you’re not responsible for IT. You might only rarely interact with your IT people or IT service providers. But the systems they manage can make the difference whether YOUR job runs smoothly or goes com- pletely off the rails. Your financial and IT sys- tems responsibilities combine with others to create opera- tional resilience, the very thing that keeps a business running in the event of a disaster or
unplanned disruption. Understanding this concept opens the door to minimizing downtime and maximizing pro- ductivity for a financial leader. But what does resilience truly mean? Can it turn potential chaos into tranquility? Let’s delve deeper. Why Does Operational Re- silience Matter? Picture your company as a well-oiled machine. Each cog, each component, plays its part seamlessly. Now, consider the impact when one of these parts falters. Suddenly, the simplic- ity of keeping cash flowing and ensuring smooth operations
turns into a tangled mess of broken metal. Operational resilience offers the framework to withstand and adapt to these disruptive challenges. It’s like having a dependable blueprint when unexpected rains flood your plans. How prepared are you and your team to handle such disruptions? To make resilience tan- gible, we break it down into pillars that support its struc- ture. This structure supports business continuity due to technological mishaps and natural calamities. Wait. Business continuity? What’s that exactly? It’s an overused IT industry term: “keep the business running even if the wheels have fallen off.” For most people, it’s easier to relate to “how do we keep the business running if there’s a tornado or a flood or we get hacked or…?” – any of many disruptive scenarios that occur. But what supports this busi- ness continuity framework, you ask? As a finance pro, a numbers person, and a person who loves all that is predictable and manageable, the answer to that question is right in your wheelhouse. The answer is planning to mitigate the risks and protect your company. Commitment to ongoing risk assessment supports the deci- sions you make. Delving into behavioral in- sights, one understands the psychological craving for securi- ty—the personal assurance that one and one’s team know what to do when disruption strikes. Isn’t it reassuring to have cer- tainty amidst uncertainty? There’s a line in the movie Hidden Figures where Kath- erine, trying to puzzle out how to bring John Glenn’s capsule from an elliptical orbit to a parabolic orbit, says, “Math is always dependable.” What I love about this – and how it applies here – is that planning and implementing risk mitigation strategies feels like a way to keep unexpected and unplanned disruptions un- der control – at least as much as we can control them. To make them dependable – like math is for numbers people. While math is dependable, weather and bad actors aren’t, and your building’s mechanical systems aren’t. But planning to manage those risks? Your continued on page 12B
nderstanding the Essentials Imagine getting to
the office one morning to realize that all your care- fully laid fi- nancial plans have been un- dermined by unforeseen disruptions
Michael Mullin
in the systems that support the business. Maybe you didn’t even make it to the office be - fore you started getting phone calls— “I can’t log in to payroll,” “Our order entry system isn’t
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