Digital Operational Resilience: The Role of Non-routine Responses in Crisis Situations

This study focuses on digital operational resilience (DOR) to ensure the stability of increasingly integrated digital services, which is currently receiving heightened attention due to ongoing environmental crisis situations. Researchers often relate DOR to planning and preparation activities, such as business continuity or disaster recovery planning. However, some types of organisations – such as scale-ups – tend to lack elaborate plans for crisis situations, mainly driven by their rapid growth and resource constraints. Such firms seem to regularly engage in non-routine responses to overcome sudden disruptions, namely heuristics (i.e., swift decisions) and improvisation (i.e., swift actions). We present preliminary results of an in-depth case study demonstrating how a FinTech scale-up applied heuristics and improvisation for its crisis response. We show how the consequences of such non-routine responses go beyond immediate crisis resolution, incurring either negative effects that need to be managed (coping debt) or opportunities to be leveraged (new/revised business processes)

Conceptualizing Digital Resilience: An Intellectual Capital Perspective

In the current era of digital transformations, numerous organizations integrate information and communication technologies (ICTs) into their core operations. However, such transformations can lead to novel risks that have to be governed in the face of disruptions. The emergence of a new risk landscape has given rise to new concepts aimed at safeguarding ICT-based operations. One of these is digital resilience (DR), a complex concept that has recently received attention from academia and regulatory bodies. However, prior work has often studied it inconsistently and offered different suggestions on how to build DR. To foster a comprehensive understanding of DR within information systems (IS), we have conducted a systematic literature review and conceptualized the problem by drawing on intellectual capital (IC) theory. We contribute to research and organizational practice by offering a novel framework with three main sub-capabilities and a comprehensive range of supporting micro-foundation, which unveils areas for future research

Digital Operational Resilience: The Role of Non-routine Responses in Crisis Situations

This study focuses on digital operational resilience (DOR) to ensure the stability of increasingly integrated digital services, which is currently receiving heightened attention due to ongoing environmental crisis situations. Researchers often relate DOR to planning and preparation activities, such as business continuity or disaster recovery planning. However, some types of organisations – such as scale-ups – tend to lack elaborate plans for crisis situations, mainly driven by their rapid growth and resource constraints. Such firms seem to regularly engage in non-routine responses to overcome sudden disruptions, namely heuristics (i.e., swift decisions) and improvisation (i.e., swift actions). We present preliminary results of an in-depth case study demonstrating how a FinTech scale-up applied heuristics and improvisation for its crisis response. We show how the consequences of such non-routine responses go beyond immediate crisis resolution, incurring either negative effects that need to be managed (coping debt) or opportunities to be leveraged (new/revised business processes)