Digital Business Resilience (W03)

Business Resilience of Office & Factory in Digital Age

There have been talks around how digitization contributes to business resilience in general. Business resilience refers to the built-in capabilities of a business to recover and resume business in the same manner as prior to disruptions. Many would naturally think that information technology (IT) has built-in resilience for being digital (not physical). We do not need to limit ourselves to IT for the reason that digitization has been applied to ‘operational technology’ (OT) as well. Digitization of operational technology is not often heard of. It is in fact a new step of evolution in the current digital age.

For a business to resume operation swiftly against disruptions and unplanned outages, we will need to know the scope of disruptions before we can build the desired capabilities. Some disruptions such as earthquakes causing collapse of buildings and loss of life will put the operation out of control and they may be non-recoverable forever. The realistic scope that we can address refers to disruptions of a temporary nature such as power cut, road closure, local fire, physical intrusion, and cyber hacking. Our business should be designed to resume normal operation as soon as the disruption has ceased or been contained. Readers will be pleasantly surprised to learn of an easy and inexpensive technique for resilience below.

A typical business consists of four types of assets, namely physical, digital, intellectual, and human. A business should be able to resume normal operation when human resources are able to operate the business with physical and digital assets in the same manner as prior to the disruption. Intellectual assets (such as patents and brand name) are rather immune to temporary physical disruptions.

As we stepped into the 4th era of the industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), digital assets have extended from the use of the Internet to the ownership of operating data and to the emergence of digital infrastructure of digital devices. Some businesses may not have made great uses of the Internet or understood the modern meaning of data. They shall learn to adapt over time or face the loss of competitiveness leading to an eventual bow-out. Digital assets are critical for the productivity and resilience of businesses.

Assume the disruption is a local fire which has been put out within a few hours. The fire would have burned down the paper files in a lawyer’s office or some product stock of a manufacturing company. Does the fire burn down data, databases, or automation algorithms inside computers? Yes, hard disks and computers can be burned down. However, the data and software in them can be duplicated, triplicated, quadruplicated and so on inexpensively for safe keeping in different locations. The computer hardware is replaceable, and the software and data can be restored. The data and software safe-keeping locations can be close-by or on the other side of the globe. In the latter case, we introduce a set of new concerns because we do not know what happens on the other side of the globe.

The good news to businesses is that more and more physical assets are being converted to digital assets which are a lot faster and cheaper to replace. On the factory floor, electronic based programmable logic controllers are now being replaced with PC. This gives rise to a new term called Edge Computing. Edge PC is
in fact the same as other PC in terms of architecture. The PC in the office is a general-purpose PC. The PC on the factory floor is a specific-purpose PC.

Summary: Digital assets allow a business to restore its operation from disruptions faster and cheaper than physical assets. The software and data component of digital assets can be replicated inexpensively for safe keeping elsewhere which is not engulfed by the same disruption at the same time. Do you agree with the above analysis? Are you pleased with this pleasantly surprising analysis outcome?