SmartSuite for the Head of Operational Resilience

Structured BIA templates carry owner assignments, automated review cycles and reminders, so every business unit refreshes its Business Impact Analysis (BIA) on the cadence you set rather than when you chase it.

Map each important business service to the processes, systems, facilities, vendors, data and teams it depends on, so impact tolerances rest on a dependency picture the whole program can see.

Plan tabletop and scenario exercises, send participant tasks automatically, track engagement and record outcomes with full traceability, so the testing schedule you manage produces evidence as it runs.

Tolerance thresholds on the risks behind each important business service raise automated alerts when exposure drifts, so the Operational Risk Manager and your team see a breach forming before a scenario test finds it.

Critical vendors carry tiering and criticality scores and are mapped to the services that depend on them, so a supplier failure shows which important business services it touches, for you and the Third-Party Risk Manager, before an exercise tests it.

Crisis Management playbooks automate escalations, notifications, communication paths and decision workflows, so when the Crisis Management Lead activates a response the IT Disaster Recovery Lead, Facilities Director and CISO are pulled in on the right path.

Every BIA, test, incident, review, control and ownership change keeps its history, so when the CRO, an auditor or a supervisor asks how a tolerance was set, the record answers without reassembly.

Use the AI Assistant in a SmartDoc field to draft scenario test summaries, incident reports and regulatory response narratives from the records already in the workspace, so the executive pack takes editing time, not writing time.

Run departmental, regional and enterprise-level resilience programs in one extensible structure, with role-based permissions and approval flows, so a business unit's plan rolls up to the enterprise picture without a parallel tracker.

Chief Risk Officer

The Head of Operational Resilience owns the resilience framework, policy and program plan, and is accountable for the whole cycle behind it: identifying important business services, setting impact tolerances, coordinating business impact analyses, approving continuity and recovery plans across departments, running the testing and exercising schedule and overseeing crisis escalation. They report readiness, recovery time objectives and maturity to executives and the board, so every business unit has to maintain, test and improve its plans.

SmartSuite structures BIAs, service mapping, continuity plans and exercise logs in one workspace, so the program runs on a schedule with automated reminders rather than on chased spreadsheets. Operational Resilience holds the important business services and their impact tolerances, Business Impact Analysis (BIA) captures the analyses behind them, and Crisis Management covers escalation and communication when a disruption is live. Each plan sits beside the service it protects, which makes approvals and refresh dates visible.

Each important business service and its tolerance is linked to the risks and controls that protect it, so the resilience view and the risk register describe the same thing. When a control weakens or a risk score rises, the service it supports shows the exposure, and the Operational Risk Manager and the resilience team are looking at one record rather than reconciling two. Critical vendors are mapped to the services that depend on them, which makes concentration risk visible as well.

Corrective actions from tests and incidents are captured in Issues Management and tracked to closure, with an owner and a due date on every item. Exercise findings do not disappear into a report; they become actions the Business Continuity Manager and Resilience Testing Lead can see, chase and close, with evidence attached. Incident Management records the incidents themselves, so the lessons from a real disruption and from a planned exercise land in the same action list.

SmartSuite dashboards show readiness metrics, testing completion, incident trends, outstanding actions and continuity maturity for executive and board reporting, drawn from the live plans, tests and actions rather than from a quarterly compilation. The Head of Operational Resilience can show the Chief Risk Officer and Chief Operating Officer which services sit within tolerance, which plans are overdue for testing and where corrective actions remain open, then take the same view to the board with the detail one click behind it.

New customers can start with SmartSuite Onboarding, a guided four-week program around one or two priority workflows. For a resilience team the first workflow is the program record: load the list of important business services, their impact tolerances and the current plans, then set the testing schedule so reminders begin. The IT Disaster Recovery Lead, Third-Party Risk Manager and Facilities Director work in the same workspace, so their plans and dependencies attach to the services they support.

The regulatory model that the UK PRA's SS1/21, the FCA rules and DORA share, of important business services, impact tolerances and scenario testing, is the structure SmartSuite uses: services are identified, tolerances set against them, and tests logged with the corrective actions that follow. ISO 22301 supplies the management system that the program plan and review cycle follow. Organizations outside financial services apply the same structure to the anchors their sector sets, such as healthcare emergency preparedness rules or NIST SP 800-34.