Enterprise Resilience
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An Introduction to Enterprise Resilience
What Is Resilience?
And What Enterra Provides
The concept of automated and dynamically updatable rule sets is powerful. It applies to all scale of activities, not only to the dynamics of globalization.
Business people may not think in terms of information technology components such as database tables, class structures, and memory variables - they more often manage using text documents, email and direct interaction - but understanding the technology and tools their organizations rely on is essential to leading a 21st century enterprise.
Enterprise Resilience Management™ is, essentially, the application of rules - in the form of software code - to technology systems.
Executable code elements are rules or - instruction sets - that cause an IT system to act intelligently and govern the circumstances and conditions under which variations occur.
The traditional approach to automating these processes is to turn descriptive documents over to designers and programmers who translate the information into executable constructs (code) that accomplish the tasks that the business documents describe.
As a consequence, the link between the business rules and the code is lost. Rule set automation benefits managers by making rules accessible in a form with which they are most comfortable - English language text documents.
Be Resilient: Introducing the Enterprise Resilience Management Solution™
Enterra Solutions provides the next-generation platform today - the tools and information that organizations need to get ahead, and stay there.
The Enterprise Resilience Management Solution™ (ERMS) helps leaders to achieve sustainable competitive advantage by better understanding and optimizing their critical assets to enable business processes and functions through:
- Security, compliance and competitive rules mapping
- Data and information integration
- Process automation
- Threat and vulnerability assessment
The Enterprise Resilience Management Solution offers a solution set that provides the fundamental building blocks for a resilient system.
Rules Set Automation and Enterra's Rules Factory™ Intelligent Content for Intelligent Business Decisions
In a globalized environment, effective leaders must have tools that keep them informed and prepared to act. Enterra's Enterprise Resilience Management Solution™ dynamically translates and manages an organization's knowledge and logic into a digital form.
ERMS™ uses proprietary, parameter-driven algorithms to create intelligent content - content that is adaptive to an ever-changing environment, predictive in modeling impacts of those changes and responsive enough to act when it counts most.
Real-time information is served to managers and senior leaders via Transparent Intelligent Interfaces™. These rich, standards-based Internet applications consolidate data and present it in a decision-support environment. The processes themselves run across a diverse array of systems using familiar, commercial off-the-shelf software tools.
The Enterprise Resilience Management Methodology™ Creating Adaptive Service-Oriented Architectures
Many organizations have converted to enterprise Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs). These SOAs help make core business processes more efficient and increase returns on investment.
To make SOAs resilient, Enterra Solutions offers a standards-based means of integrating data and information. The Enterra methodology provides an assessment system that identifies an organization's critical assets along with the processes and functions that define those assets. It aligns the organization's management and technology infrastructures, lays a path forward for implementation and allows the organization to take full advantage of the resilient solution.
Four Aspects of Resilience
Enterprise Resilience Management Methodology
To perform better, an organization needs to do more than just improve incrementally - it needs to fundamentally transform its approach. And that transformation begins with asking the right strategic questions.
Enterra's Enterprise Resilience Management™ process may sound like a technology-centric solution - and indeed, it has a significant technology component, focused on the automation of rules and information technology architectures - but before technology allows critical business processes to operate across an organization's departments, providing for an organization-wide response, there needs to be a significant strategic planning phase.
Before the Enterprise Resilience Management Solution™ can be built and deployed, the first step is to apply the Enterprise Resilience Management Methodology™, which systematically identifies:
- The organization's critical assets
- The business processes that support those assets
- The rules that apply to the processes
- The threat actors that have the potential to disrupt the processes and put the assets at risk. Threat actors might be individuals, such as terrorists - or they might be natural occurrences, such as a major hurricane.
The methodology lays the groundwork for an integrated solution that encompasses people,
process and technology. But at a much more basic level, it forces the organization to consider - in a strategic, top-down, systematic way - what its critical assets are, and how to go about defending them.
Content: "Intelligent Content and Rules Set Automation - A Dewey Decimal System for the Information Age"
Technology alone cannot address 21st century challenges. Business leaders often feel like someone in an arcade trying to play one of those "Whack-a-Varmint" games. The process is reactive, hit-and-miss, and often decision makers are overcome by events simply because they sense, think, and act fast enough. Without resilient management strategies, technology cannot bridge the gaps that exist in today's business environment.
The paucity of efficiencies throughout the global marketplace demonstrates that there is no way to deal with the rule changes in a global economy manually. Maturity and complexity in an organization will allow for sustainable responses to rule set changes when the systems themselves are changed. In order to succeed, global enterprises need to crack open stove piped information centers that protect, maintain, and operate critical infrastructure.
Rule set automation makes steps toward business transformation, including enterprise architecture and enterprise transition planning. New enterprise architecture offers more than an array of systems to manage people and processes that run a business. Enterra Solutions offers the fusion of logic and technology to create rules that learn and predict.
How does the idea of new rule sets directly lead us to the idea of resilience? Enterprise Resilience Management is a system that automates and leverages rules to produce intelligent content that will guide decisions and reduce the impact of stressors.
To transform an organization into a Resilient Enterprise™, it is necessary to:
- Think strategically and identify from the top down the organization's critical assets and the business processes that enable them;
- Establish the rules that apply to those business processes;
- Transform those rules into code so that the processes become automated, and can be executed quickly, consistently and effectively. The code must be kept up to date, so that processes are always current with new and changing requirements.
- Maintain the transparency of these automated processes so they are visible to managers and senior executives, who can then intervene and take direct action when needed.
Resilient response is dynamic, but always rules-based. Rules, in this context, can take many forms: regulations, performance metrics, and previously undocumented institutional intelligence contained in the minds of employees, and the organization's best practices, all applied to its most critical business processes.
Regulations impose process requirements on organizations. Sometimes these are straightforward. For example: at a commercial bank, a critical asset is a customer. One of the most critical business processes that enables that asset - the customer - is the process of opening a new checking or credit account.
The USA Patriot Act and the Bank Secrecy Act require a bank, before it opens a checking account for a new customer, to conduct identity verification by a series of process steps, one of which is checking OFAC - the Office of Foreign Asset Control - to determine if the applicant is on the Treasury Department's terrorist watch list. That step must be taken every time a new checking account is opened, and it must be auditable after the fact. The step is critical, repeatable - and therefore a prime candidate to be automated via a code-based system that runs each time an account is opened, and that generates its own audit trail.
Sometimes, statutory language is less clear, and is subject to interpretation. Nevertheless, once the organization's compliance officers arrive at their interpretation (or once an interpretation is established by the courts), the result is a required, repeatable series of steps. Sarbanes-Oxley, for example, is a complex piece of legislation that imposes many requirements on public companies and their auditors. The most onerous of the Sarbanes-Oxley requirements is that the business processes surrounding the financial transactions of public companies must be auditable. The challenge for public companies - and now certain agencies of the federal sector - is the need to create a mechanism that meets the audit requirement. They must design business processes efficiently, determine and embed the rules that apply to the process so that the process runs according to the rules in a consistent manner, monitor the business process for compliance with the rules, and provide a systemic means of auditing the process, all without adding cost.
“ERMS Solution Set: Resilient Technology Architecture - Fortifying the Framework for Success”
Resilient Technology Architecture™: Reinventing the Structural Frame
As the first skyscrapers revealed a new way of thinking, ERMS introduces a new way of doing business. Skyscrapers showcased the new materials and methods that architects used to overcome the limitations of the load bearing stonework of the past. Steel frameworks redistributed the weight of a structure and let architecture soar to new heights.
Enterra Solutions presents the new technologies, tactics and approach that leaders need to build organizations that are far more flexible, resilient and unconstrained than structures of the past. Using the framework of service-oriented architectures, Enterra Solutions shows clients how to redistribute the load within their own organizations.
Systematically and transparently, Enterra Solutions helps organizations to manage compliance changes, security issues and rapidly shifting competitive fields. Using language that decision makers understand, the Resilient Technology Architecture™, deploys automated rule sets at the process and data layers of the service-oriented architecture.
While Enterra's technology solution is revolutionary, the end products - memos, guidelines, directives, policies and forms - are the same; thus, they maintain familiar but more efficient operations.
The Enterprise Resilience Management Solution can be applied to a single critical asset and scaled to other assets as needed. It is cost-effective and designed to take maximum advantage of the organization's existing IT systems. The result is far-reaching in its impact on compliance, security and performance.
A Well Choreographed Holistic Solutions Set
Enterra Solutions' products and technology offerings can be likened to a performance by a dance troupe. A dance troupe consists of individual dancers. To achieve success each dancer in the troupe must perform his or her part individually but in harmony with the steps and actions of other dancers. To achieve that harmony, the choreographer designs a dance that fits the music and then must explain it to each dancer so that he or she understands what they must do and when. To complicate matters, imagine a choreographer who must speak to each dancer in a different language. Working together an extraordinarily difficult and complex performance can look effortless and achieve a stunning effect. The dance needs to be performed on an appropriate stage. It must be appropriate to the music, which plays in real-time and serves as the stimulus that instructs the dancers when to move. But most importantly, the only reason anyone pays to see the dance is because they value the content of the music and dance. Taking that analogy a step further, Enterra products and technology can be seen playing the following roles:
- Rule Set Automation - The Choreographer and The Conductor
- Resilient Technology Architecture™ - Place and the Actors: The Stage, The Dancers, and The Orchestra
- Intelligent Content - The Sheet Music and the Choreography
- ResilienceNet / Development-in-a-Box / Processes - The Performance
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