THG Advisors’ Post

What game is this now and what are the rules and boundaries? What does resilience mean and how do we help our companies attain it at a finite cost in a world of undefined connectedness? As we look at the luggage and people stacked up in Atlanta's airport, are we seeing an opportunity to return to first principles on risk and resilience? Many years ago, I worked in the operations portfolio at a major airline and was performing a risk assessment on the baggage handling system. The application owner informed me that his system was one of the most critical systems at the airline, "Because, Walt, you know how upset people can get when we lose bags or have a delay." I next talked to the director of the portfolio for ops, who had a different perspective - he said of the three apps in the mix, baggage handling is important, but not as critical as getting the crews assigned to the equipment (matching to the planes) and getting the equipment to the gate ready to fly. At the VP level next, I was told, "Walt, you know when you fly, we always have those paper tickets to attach to your bags by every counter - the reason is because that system crashes quite often, but our manual process fills the gaps, and we mostly get the baggage where it needs to be on time without that application. We could shut it off tomorrow and no one would notice." Three levels in the organization - three dramatically different prioritizations on a single system. A while back, our team at Okta ran into a system failure from a third party that kept our internal employees from being able to access systems. The problem was not with Okta's systems or their partner's systems, but yet another service that was purchased and bundled in. It took a while to figure out who in the value chain had ownership of the root cause and how we could work around the time needed to repair. We temporarily suspended our MFA requirement to allow access to revenue generating applications. As more and more services are moving outside of our previously defined boundaries, finding the edge and negotiating service levels has gotten more and more complicated. At THG Advisors, we have a whole team of senior leaders in this space with vast experience and strong, differentiated practices for helping our clients handle this new version of a very old game of risk management and business continuity. #RiskManagement #BusinessContinuity #ResilienceBuilding #THGAdvisors

What an exceptional Higher Gear CXO Virtual Forum we had today on "Simplifying AI"! Grateful to our sponsors CelticQA Solutions and THG Advisors for making it possible. Special thanks to our host Kelly Kierans, moderator Marty Smith, and our panelists: * Gopal Narasimhan, Chief Digital & Technology Officer at Hope Enterprise Corporation * Shaun Hunt, CIO at McKenney's, Inc. * Jig Patel, former Global Chief Technology Officer at Morningstar The insights shared by these leaders and the engaged C-level technology executive attendees made for a truly valuable discussion. At Higher Gear CXO, we believe in leaders helping leaders reach new heights - today's forum exemplified that mission. Looking forward to our next event! #AI #TechnologyLeadership #CXO #Innovation #DigitalTransformation