BSI’s Brendon Hill explores what the aerospace industry needs to prepare for and protect against in order to achieve organisational resilience.
Only resilient organisations will survive and prosper over the long term. To help them, BSI has developed the world’s first Organizational Resilience Index report and benchmarking tool that can show them just how resilient they are.
The Index comes at a time of intense and unrelenting business disruption, not least for the aerospace industry. Organisational resilience is about the ability to adapt to change. It is about being innovative, constantly learning and improving to overcome adversity and spring forward to seize new opportunities.
Research findings
BSI’s study found that, overall, leaders regard all 16 elements as important [see image below].
Reputation is seen as the most critical element for the long-term success of the business, even more important than financial aspects, leadership, and vision and purpose.
Despite this, 43% of the leaders interviewed believe their organisation is strongly susceptible to reputational risk.
When asked to rate their own resilience, different sectors have widely differing perceptions of themselves.
Focusing on aerospace
The advent of the revised AS 9100 series of quality management standards has led aerospace organisations to consider areas they may not have examined previously in relation to quality management, such as strategic intent, risk, and ‘context of the organisation’. Many are looking at themselves through a new lens and asking: “Just how resilient are we?”
Now, the BSI Organizational Resilience Index shows the indicators aerospace leaders rank highest in terms of performance and importance for their industry:
On the positive side, most feel the alignment of their business is strong, with staff pulling together in the same strategic direction.
Similarly, they believe they are performing well in terms of financial aspects and leadership. More worryingly perhaps, particularly for a sector undergoing tremendous changes due to digitalisation and technology, innovation is ranked surprisingly low.
Building cyber-resilience
With reputational risk being such a critical element for organisations in the aerospace industry, it’s vital to ensure that best practices are in place to allow stakeholders to gather, store, access, use and destroy information securely.
Resilient organisations embed information security in their employee behaviours. Is your organisation confident that all physical, digital and intellectual property is managed correctly – throughout its lifecycle, from source to destruction?
Brendon will be speaking at the FINN Sessions at Farnborough International Airshow (16-22 July) on the ‘Future cybersecurity challenges facing the aerospace industry’ in the Innovation Theatre on Thursday 19 July.
BSI also invites visitors to join them for a drinks reception at Stand 1125, Hall 1 on Thursday 19 July at 4pm. This will be an opportunity to network with BSI experts and like-minded aerospace professionals.
