When facilitating strategic decision-making from leaders across the organization, timely and accurate management reporting is always critical, but even more so in times of crisis. To expedite the production of key reports and metrics, it is essential to have agility in reporting and the ability to utilize real-time accurate data. Financial institutions’ operational resilience plans should address the availability and accuracy of these important data sources.

For the critical business processes and systems, an assessment of the organization’s data management and governance practices should be based off key management reports with a focus on analyzing the following factors:

  • A review of data availability and security, and if any compromises or “on the fly” alternatives had to be implemented for reporting to be effective. For example, to facilitate real-time reporting, the organization may have bypassed data warehouses and sourced it directly from various upstream systems. A robust data governance policy should have addressed its availability, so any shortcomings should be investigated.
  • A reassessment of the production time needed from data inception to when the report was available to management, as well as the root causes of any time delays, such as new issues with system availability or performance problems that were uncovered during the crisis.
  • Reviewing and addressing known data quality issues that resulted in critical reporting delays or caveats being placed on key reports, thereby limiting their usefulness for quick decision making.

Data is the organizational asset underpinning all critical business processes and organizational silos. Putting a robust governance framework around it to ensure that it stands up during times of crisis provides senior management the confidence to use it to make critical and timely strategic decisions.

In this series, we have covered the six critical operational resilience areas that your organization should be reassessing to emerge stronger from a crisis. As your organization evolves, so should your operational resilience plan. The ability to make adjustments based on actions taken during a live crisis provides the most valuable lessons that will help your organization better prepare for any future disruption.