New Delhi, March 24 (IANS) A five-phase strategic and systematic approach to strengthen the resilience of organizations current business models is the key to business continuity amid the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Gartner said on Tuesday.

"Companies tend to have traditional business continuity strategies and plans that focus on the continuity of the resources and processes but omit the business model," Daniel Sun, Research Vice President at Gartner, said in a statement.

"However, the business model itself can be a threat to continuity of operations in external events, such as the global outbreak of COVID-19."

According to the market research firm, facing the contingency of COVID-19 outbreaks, companies should first focus on their core customers that are essential to their continuity of operations, and then refer to a process of defining their current business models by asking questions focused on their customers, value propositions, capabilities and financial models.

CIOs can play a key role in the process of raising current business model resilience to ensure ongoing operations, since digital technologies and capabilities can influence every aspect of business models.

"CIOs should participate in, or coordinate, the brainstorming sessions to identify any uncertainties from COVID-19 outbreaks," said Sun.

"CIOs can share some of IT's potential uncertainties and threats, such as issues with IT infrastructure, applications and software systems."
Companies should focus on the risks that the uncertainty poses to the components of the business model amid the coronavirus outbreak.
The decision on which changes to execute is principally a decision for senior leadership teams.

Senior leadership teams should select the strategies they feel most compelling to implement, which is often based on both economic calculations and intuition.

"Once senior leadership teams select the business and IT change initiatives, CIOs should apply an agile approach in executing the initiatives. For example, they can form an agile (product) team of multidisciplinary team members, enabling the alignment between business and IT and ensuring delivery speed and quality," noted Sun.

--IANS ksc/na