Resilience in a Digital Age

Resilience is not a unitary system quality, even though it often is treated as such. A system cannot be, and cannot have resilience, but a system can perform in a way that is resilient. Resilient performance can be understood as an ongoing condition in which problems are momentarily under control due to compensating changes. This is essential for environments where unexpected and unpredictable changes can emerge and where their consequences can propagate rapidly. To perform resiliently, a system must have the potentials to respond, to monitor, to learn, and to anticipate. The chapter describes how the four potentials can be systematically assessed and how such assessments make it possible to manage them, hence the overall resilient performance of the system.

High-complex operations, such as healthcare, air traffic management and oil and gas exploration, are facing increasing and new challenges concerning digital transformation. These transformations are happening due to the growing need for better and more efficient and safe work processes, precise outcomes, consistency, and continuity in operations in the face of variabilities, risks, and uncertainties. In this study, we discuss the use of FRAM (Functional Resonance Analysis Method) modelling to understand and identify variability in integrated operations by examining six instantiations of operations in the oil and gas industry. Five challenges of integrating digital transformation and support resilience in these systems are discussed: provision of support for coordination demands; provision of support for adequate human supervision of automated functions; reduction of system opacity; provision of support for adaptations; and provision of support for operators’ non-technical skills. The study highlights that the operations analysed rely on human-machine interactions to perform resiliently, and workers locally manage variabilities in the system, assuring the continuity of safe operations while reconciling multiple goals (e.g. safety, efficiency, quality). The instantiations demonstrated the importance of the operators in making decisions when organising responses for disarming and recovery, which is not programmed and expected by the technical system.

In the current context, marked by the challenges of the digital transformation, the climate emergency, the risks of the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic and health crisis, resilience emerged as a concept explaining how societies, systems, and subsystems can respond to shocks and better manage the inherent risks that are constantly changing. With the digital transformation and the increasing use of the internet by organisations, relational capital has emerged as one of the components of intellectual capital with greater relevance for the resilience and agility of organisations. Through the most recent literature review, this study explores the relationship between relational capital and firms’ resilience indicators. The results provide empirical evidence for the positive relationship between the two concepts and present the basis for developing an auditing framework of organisational resilience.

The current changes in the labour market, induced by technological advances, have required several adaptations from organisations, generating recurring transformations. Employees and professionals are required to have new skills and qualifications. In turn, from organisations, these changes require adaptations in various perspectives, from their structure to their culture and even to their strategies. In this context, resilience is a key factor for this organisational system to adapt so that it can sustain its operations under these new, more complex and uncertain performance constraints. To understand how resilience can contribute to the sustainable adaptation of organisations, this article explores management practices that enhance resilience in the context of digital transformation. Thus, through an exploratory analysis based on previous studies, the main practices and strategies that enable organisations to leverage their intellectual capital in the intrinsic aspects of resilience and the formidable context of today’s digital transformation have been identified. The main results point to invest in resources that enhance each of the structures of Intellectual Capital, such as training, relationships with stakeholders and applied technologies, with a view to strengthening organisational resilience, given the challenges imposed by the digital transformation of today’s society.

Complexity and instability are elements present in the oil and gas industry, making it challenging to predict and deal with all elements and situations that may affect the safety of its operations. Thus, it is essential to classify and analyse the factors that condition resilient performance to promote assertive interventions and increase the resilience potential in this sector. This chapter presents a framework that operationalises the analysis of the factors that condition resilience through methods and techniques of knowledge engineering and resilience engineering. The framework consists of a knowledge model that represents elements that condition resilient performance and data science tools to enable handling and analysing workers’ perceptions and supporting the analysis of safety events. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the framework was established involving an integrative review of the literature and the contribution of experts from several areas for defining the analysis model. Knowledge engineering methods and techniques were used to enable data analysis on integrated operations of companies in the oil and gas sector, thus allowing a systemic view on the conditionings of resilient performance in the companies that participated in the study. As main results, a new generation of tools for data processing and support for the analysis of factors that influence the potential for resilience and a holistic view of latent factors for promoting resilience are highlighted.

Resilience has been associated with the development of competences in many areas and is considered a determining factor in situations that involve major challenges. In recent years, with the emergence of sustainability issues, particularly the climate issue, resilience has been associated with countries’ sustainability. Furthermore, many resilience attributes seem to be founded and reinforced through intellectual capital components. Nowadays, resilience has become one of the most used words by decision-makers in all areas of society. Economic and social crises have forced countries to face numerous challenges that have tested their decision-making capacity and adaptation in a short period and a turbulent context. However, it appears that some countries have more agility than others in these processes of response and adaptation. This chapter aims to explore, at a national level, the possible relation between the concepts of Intellectual Capital, Resilience, Reliability, Sustainability, and Reputation. The research is supported by a data-driven approach, oriented by a path analysis model. This study contributes to the literature on resilience, and it can serve as a support to decision-makers, allowing to identify the determinants of resilience in terms of the management of intellectual capital, sustainability, and countries’ reputation.

Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated which is an unimaginable figure to human beings and even machine. To achieve the global smart city vision, automation, resilience, and sustainable development are crucial elements. This chapter focuses on resilient Internet of Things that links individuals and sensing devices which forms the foundation of data collection and provides ground truth of information. With the tremendous growth of primary data volumes and diversity in every domain, they have played an ever more crucial role in enabling researchers and enterprises to formulate processing and analysis methods to extract latent information from multiple data resources and to leverage a broad range of data management and analytics platforms. We have been witnessed the successful technology story of artificial intelligence in various applications. However, resilient and sustainable development has not yet fully integrated into artificial intelligence applications. It requires automated update and improvement of trained machine learning model with the ever-increasing data. This chapter is organised as follows. Firstly, a systematic review of the existing works of resilience and sustainability for smart city is presented. This is followed by a comparison of IoT solutions in software and hardware perspective. Various future research directions and conceptual study of smart city application are discussed.

In the age of digitalisation, good governance and management have become even more important for the resilience of organisations. On the organisational level, resilience is mainly seen as the ability to survive and prosper. The resilient structure is assumed to follow the digital ownership strategy, while changes in strategy lead to changes in the chain of command and thus should be followed by a change in culture. Previous research has stressed that ownership strategy is where corporate governance meets strategic management. Furthermore, it has been argued that this is meaningful only for corporations with concentrated ownership. Claiming that all corporate entities need governing, the authors of this chapter study how resilience can be enhanced in the implementation process of ownership strategies by making use of the opportunities offered by digitalisation. This exploratory research is based on action research involving health care organisations from Estonia. The results presented in this chapter are valuable in several ways. By proposing a digital ownership strategy as a substitute for smart contracts, the study adds a new facet to contract theory. An improved understanding of the needed match between organisational core values and individual values may also enhance organisational resilience and success.

In turbulent and constantly changing environments, it is critical for organisations to establish strategies to strengthen their resilience. Although knowledge is recognised as a key resource for resilience capabilities, there is a gap in the literature on strategies for identifying and developing critical knowledge to cope with unexpected. This chapter describes a framework that systematises the identification, assessment, and development of critical knowledge to the capabilities of monitoring, anticipating, and responding to new circumstances. The framework was applied in knowledge-intensive organisations and made it possible to establish an assertive action plan for knowledge management, focusing on strengthening the resilience capacities of the analysed organisations.

This chapter explores the potentials for organisational resilience stemming from digitalised simulations. The point of departure is experiences with the case of endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR), in which established health care professions (surgeons and radiologists) develop new patterns of collaboration through simulations based on digital re-presentations of the patient. The analytical focus is on digital re-presentations, situated as boundary objects that may mitigate potentially harmful power tensions that may hinder the development of new, cross-disciplinary practices. On the other side, digital re-presentations may also create a hyper-reality, possibly conveying new vulnerabilities, e.g., joint blind spots due to lack of articulation work needed to reveal them. The experiences from the healthcare domain are projected towards a focus on potential use of digital simulation in context of critical infrastructures in which professional roles are less historically/traditionally established, but in which there is an urgent need to build coherence and collaborative practices between IT/OT, safety/security professionals due to continuous (disruptive) digitalisation and imminent cyber threats.

Digital transformation turns critical infrastructures into cyber-physical systems, introducing unprecedented levels of complexity and vulnerability. As the evidence of surprise and shocks involving cyber-physical systems is high and rising, concepts of resilience are increasingly enrolled in discourses around vulnerability in critical infrastructures. In this chapter, we discuss the theoretical foundations for a concept of cyber resilience, and the needs, potentials, and pitfalls in this respect. Our aim is to point to a research agenda of abductive reasoning, where a concept of resilience is developed through stepwise, reflexive theoretical advances together with ongoing efforts of empirical grounding in particular cyber-physical domains.

Technology impacts almost every aspect of our lives and has become an important part of healthcare services. The most important reason for introducing technological advancements in healthcare is to enhance or maintain the high quality of care. Digital learning tools (e.g. digital guides, webinars, and dialogue forums) have the potential to increase flexibility and adaptability in healthcare which are important features of resilience in healthcare. In the current chapter, we discuss how digital learning tools can be used to promote resilience in healthcare by using examples from two research projects; one in which a digital guide to support managers in their quality improvement work is designed, tested, and evaluated (the SAFE-LEAD project), and one aiming to develop future digital learning tools for collaborative learning to facilitate resilience in healthcare (the Resilience in Healthcare project). We argue that for digital learning tools to have the potential to promote resilience in healthcare, they should stimulate individual and collective reflections and discussions. Furthermore, the tools must be found relevant by the target audience and have the capacity to create collaborative learning and reflections between relevant stakeholders within and outside healthcare organisations, about current quality and safety practice, challenges and needs for adaptations and improvement efforts. By stimulating collaborative learning, reflections, and adaptive capacity, digital learning tools have the potential to promote resilience in healthcare, and thereby increasing healthcare quality.

Disasters like the recent COVID-19 pandemic can benefit from the use of digital tools and Knowledge Management Systems (KMSs) to manage the emergency and improve the resilience of the system. Such KMSs must prove the quality of the system, service, situation, and knowledge which is gathered, transferred, and shared. However, KMSs must cope with the presence of knowledge barriers, which limit to manage data and information successfully. Our chapter wants to deepen such a topic through the analysis of the case study of a web application developed by the IHU Strasbourg, one research and clinical centre, to collect and share knowledge between the end-users (citizens) and healthcare institutions, decision-makers, and public entities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings highlight the need to ensure that not only the KMS possesses the recommended quality standards, but that specific features are put in place to cope with the presence of knowledge barriers, and the need for speed in the information flows to enhance resilience.

We present the backbone of a knowledge graph to support the next generation of functional resonance analyses in the safety area by means of automatic reasoning services. The proposed knowledge graph is expected to incorporate existing industrial ontologies, according to the needs of safety analysts, and to handle the diversity of upper ontology models that may have been adopted for the development of enterprise-specific application ontologies. We briefly describe some possible usages of this knowledge graph, i.e. systematic exploration of safety-critical processes, analysis of misalignments of work-as-done from work-as-imagined process representations, creative design of work-as-done, and inter-company alignment of safety-critical processes to safety goals. Finally, we discuss the major implications of our proposal for safety analysts and safety practitioners.

Aviation digital non-normal checklists neither solve the problematic nature of procedures as organisational control mechanisms nor capitalise on the benefits of the technology. To create resilient operational systems, it is necessary to shift towards seeing abnormal and emergency checklists as resources for the activity: A piece of information that helps pilots assess the severity of the problem, diagnose the cause and plan, and implement a proper response when needed if needed. Fragmented checklists, integrating different resources in just one place, and Decision Support System technology are mechanisms to enhance the potential of the digital quick reference handbook.

The path and velocity of technological innovations sparked a process of digital transformation in almost every economic sector. It goes without saying that cultural aspects play a fundamental role in these processes both at a national level as well as at an institutional one. This chapter presents a case study of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), an important Brazilian federal institution whose mission is to implement government policies to foster national development in different forms. The BNDES’s case is particularly interesting as it focuses its attention on how intellectual capital and cultural characteristics shaped the digitalisation strategy of an important part of its operations from 2016 to 2019. For the purpose of the present analysis, two researchers were used: one involving an organisational survey directed at all 2700 employees and the other a qualitative interview with key executives. The result demonstrated that aspects like the culture of silos and its hierarchy (both also found in Brazilian Culture) acted as obstacles as it underwent this digital transformation process, even when the traditional and current process posed a threat to the existence of business model sustainability in the near future. The BNDES case sheds light on the importance of building resilient institutions in opposition to resistant ones. A strategy of change starts by recognising patterns of cultural behaviours in an organisation and the need to shape them to adaptation and suitability. Once that strategy is well implemented in a particular sector of activities, it can then act as a benchmark for future reference and guidelines of action.

This chapter illustrates how resilience capability affects digital transformation by means of the case studies of two Italian middle-sized manufacturing companies that implemented important investments in digital technologies in recent years. Both companies show significant levels of resilience, which nevertheless result from different combinations of resilience drivers. One company displays a control-oriented model of resilience aimed at controlling change in the external environment, whereas the other one is characterised by a learning-oriented model of resilience intended for absorbing complexity. This difference reflects in the design and the execution of investments in digital technologies. The first company seems to perceive digitalisation as a further technological innovation in line with a traditional pursuit of efficiency. In contrast, the other company frames digital technologies a solution to increase the integration of organisational processes, besides technical ones.