In this series, Facility Executive introduces you to one of the many business continuity professionals scheduled to speak at the 21st Annual Continuity Insights Management Conference, which will take place at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, April 24-26, 2023.
In these times, when the need for critical information-sharing has never been greater, Continuity Insights offers insight, inspiration, and actionable ideas presented by a faculty of leading business continuity experts and practitioners. This conference provides a timely and important opportunity to share best practices, lessons learned, and effective strategies employed to ensure organizational resilience.
Here, we chat with Ray Bonilla, Head of Global Business Continuity for Meta.
Facility Executive: Tell us about your background. How did you first start getting involved with business resiliency?
Ray Bonilla: I joined the business resilience profession as a project manager supporting the build out of T-Mobile’s business continuity program across the engineering and operations divisions post Hurricane Katrina in 2006. During this time, I realized the power of preparedness, and developed a passion for this work in which I’ve been involved in to this day. After a year at T-Mobile, I transitioned into healthcare where I had the opportunity to lead (and for IT, build from the ground up) all aspects of business resilience to include business continuity, crisis management, IT resiliency, IT disaster and cyber recovery, incident management, and problem management for Kaiser Permanente. After 15 years at Kaiser Permanente, I decided to pursue a global role in the technology industry and joined Meta as the head of Global Business Continuity where I’m currently re-envisioning our resilience capabilities.
FE: In your own words, what is organizational resilience?
RB: Organizational resilience is the ability of an organization (its people, processes, technologies, services, vendors) to quickly rebound and bounce back stronger when faced with disruptions and adversity. It’s the adaptive capacity to flex, bend, adjust, and learn in a planful way, despite challenges.
It is essential for facility management to partner with business resilience to ensure that alternative plans are in place to sustain critical operations during any disaster or issue that renders critical facility unavailable.
FE: Why is this important for facility management to prioritize?
RB: Many organizations are critically reliant on their facilities to operate. Take for example, a hospital, a data center, or an airport…without the availability of key facilities, critical operations will come to a halt. It is essential for facility management to partner with business resilience to ensure that alternative plans are in place to sustain critical operations during any disaster or issue that renders critical facility unavailable.
FE: Can you give our readers some insight about the Human Centered Design principles you’ll be discussing in your presentation?
RB: Business resilience is a profession centered around people. We need people to engage with the program, and work together to evolve an organization’s resilience. I would argue that getting this right is one of the most important elements of your program’s success, and your professional success for that matter. We will explore how to build a business resilience program centered around people, using simple human centered design thinking principles to captivate, motivate, and engage our stakeholders. The principles include identifying, understanding, and addressing the core problems, being people-centered in our approach, taking a systems point of view – realizing that most complications result from the interdependencies of the multiple parts, and rapidly iterating to ensure the resilience solutions truly meet the needs of the people and your business.
RAY’S BREAKOUT SESSION
Resilience Is A Team Sport — Driving Broader Organization Engagement And Impact
Measurement, Metrics, and Maturity Track
Monday, April 24, 2023
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
The presenter will share how Human Centered Design principles can been applied in any organization to power (and achieve) higher levels of organizational resilience. Learn how to galvanize resilience within your organization by driving engagement at all levels. Approaching resilience as a team, it significantly boosts our ability to overcome anything! Everyone has a role to play in resilience and are stronger as a team, organization, community, and world! Let’s build the teams necessary to power resilience.
FE: Why do you think they’re important to discuss in a conversation about organizational resilience?
RB: Successful business resilience requires cross-organizational alignment and engagement at all levels within an organization to realize its full value. Designing your program around your stakeholders will help ensure your organization is engaged, stays aligned, and effectively collaborates to evolve resilience.
FE: What would you like your audience to takeaway from your presentation?
RB: Applying human centered design principles to our business resilience program is doable by everyone, and the impact has the power to significantly strengthen your organization’s resilience.
