I really should no longer be so surprised that my idea of how to differ robustness from flexibility from agility from resilience resonates with quite a number of people, including Si Alhir.
Robustness. Flexibility. Agility. Resilience. One of my concepts that I have found cited more recently is what started out 11 years ago, and what later became in my mind the perfect illustration of these four terms.
Resilience. A key ingredient in supply chain risk management. Also a key ingredient in logistics risk management. Cognitive resilience, behavioral resilience and contextual resilience must all come together for a resilient enterprise to emerge.
This blog has previously reported profusely on flexibility, let alone resilience and robustness, but has severely neglected agility. With this post, I intend to take a closer look at what it means to be agile. This is the only reference I have found that properly differentiates between agility and flexibility and what being agile actually entails.
Conceptual in its approach and drawing from other areas of research, this paper introduces four distinct groups of VENS, namely Constrained, Directed, Limited and Free VEN, and concludes that VEN risk management can and should learn from supply chain risk management.
Someone had to come up with this, it was just a matter of time, and it is no suprise that this article comes from India, one of the major providers of global outsourcing for many industries.
These concepts are often confused, and thus, warrant further explanation. They are distinctively different.
The other day I came across a new term: Agile Business Continuity, on the blog of Paul James, agilecontinuity.org. It is a blog that is well worth reading and I think that the word agile really captures the essence of what business continuity management (BCM) is about in the first place.
In a previous post I discussed the issue of Flexibility and robustness to reduce risk and uncertainty. Since then a new term has emerged: resilience, and today I will take a look at that.
