Perspectives on Measuring Enterprise Resilience

The new paradigm, known as "resilience engineering", emphasizes the importance of measuring resilience and suggests the development of methodologies to analyze and prepare to improve the resilience of enterprises. In this paper we review existing resilience measurement methodologies, and propose new modes of measurement. We define enterprise resilience as the capacity to decrease vulnerability, the ability to change and adapt, and the ability to recover quickly from disruption. Using this definition, we identify metrics which evaluate, more specifically: (1) an enterprise's capability to decrease its level of vulnerability to expected and unexpected events, (2) its ability to change itself and adapt to changing environment; (3) its ability to recover in the least possible time in case of a disruptive event. Based on the discussed enterprise resilience metrics, we use several examples and evaluate a set of illustrative responses to common disruptions.