Customer Insights 2023: Fusion’s February Community Exchange Round Up
Fusion continuously strives to drive organizations, teams, and careers forward. One way in which we do so is through our customer community, ENGAGE, and our portfolio of ENGAGE events, such as our weekly Community Exchanges. These events serve as great opportunities for our customers to expand their networks and keep informed about Fusion’s product capabilities, enhancements, and roadmap direction.
Specifically, our Community Exchanges are virtual open forums that have been designed to bring Fusion customers together to share ideas, experiences, and industry trends on a weekly basis. We’ve been so inspired by the level of customer participation that has been taking place during these sessions that we wanted to shed some insight into the types of topics that are discussed during our Community Exchanges. If you’ve missed one of our February 2023 sessions, no need to fret! Below is the breakdown of February’s informational topics.
Integration – Maintaining Employee Records
It is extremely important to make sure that your employee data is up to date – especially in a time of compounding crises and unprecedented disruptions. During this Community Exchange session, we discussed a few approaches that you can take to ensure that your employee records are current. The most common approaches that Fusion’s clients take include:
- Leveraging automation, such as APIs (application programming interfaces)
- Manually uploading employee data to systems via a single file
- Triggering flows within Fusion to automate how employee data is synced, handled, leveraged, and reported on within our platform; these flows include associating employees to teams, updating employee data, removing terminated employees, and/or marking employees as “active” or “inactive”
Following the last point, attendees also discussed how they use different integrations and connectors with Fusion to send out emergency notifications, monitor situational awareness notifications, and visualize their programs more holistically.
Designing for Effective Outcomes: Dashboards and Reports
During this Community Exchange session, Fusion had one of our clients come on as guest speaker! She demonstrated how her and her team use the Fusion Framework® System™ for:
- Creating dashboard templates with simple visuals to document, organize, track, make sense of, and tell stories of the data collected; this is accomplished by utilizing filters that can be applied to each component within a dashboard and are customizable to fit each business’s unique needs
- Comparing native and custom dashboards for incident management, production applications, and business continuity risk
- Our Advanced Reporting functionality in order to demonstrate data and reports when there are a large number of products, applications, suppliers, etc. involved
Throughout the session, the Q&A aspect was very active, with much engagement and participation from Fusion’s product and product marketing teams as well as various other clients who were interested in learning more details about how our guest speaker utilizes Fusion’s dashboards and Advanced Reporting functionality.
Processes, Dependencies, and Important Business Services
This Community Exchange conversation brought some interesting insights to the forefront regarding the ways in which our customers structure their programs. Key themes that emerged throughout the conversation include:
- Our customers have different ways in which their organizations capture, record, map, and report on their data as well as identify, define, look at, and highlight their important business services
- Depending on the industry, there are different areas of interest: for the education industry, the focus is on life and safety services whereas the manufacturing industry focuses more on business services, application services, and/or technical services
There were also questions raised on what our customers are collecting from a process and/or dependency level and who in their organization is collecting this data. Common themes include:
- Some organizations require their business and technology owner subject matter experts to provide information to their resilience team
- Other organizations are pulling their application, business continuity, and IT data from a CMDB (configuration management database)
Overall, clients during this session had a great exchange of ideas about a very important part of the journey towards operational resilience.
Trending Risks/Threats, Effective Approaches, and Strategies for Risk Management
The discussion topics for this month’s European Community Exchange (which takes place at an earlier time for our European clients but is open to all Fusion users regardless of location) revolved around three main points:
- Centralized versus decentralized risk management – The group discussed examples of how their organizations function:
- Some mentioned that their cyber team is decentralized because their cyber, risk, and disaster recovery functions fall under the broader IT team whereas other functions fall within the risk and compliance team
- Others have each domain with their own risk approach (including business continuity, procurement, etc.) which aggregates up to an enterprise risk management lens; many organizations want to break down these silos though because they realize that it is critical to use the same common language in order to be able to manage risks appropriately
- Horizon scanning – It can be difficult to stay on top of all of the different threats that can impact your organization while also ignoring the white noise. It is necessary to understand what your important products and services are as well as how they are delivered so that you have the ability to raise risks before they escalate. A few key ways to do this is by:
- Using scenario analysis to play out potential risks so that you know what to expect and what areas and services will be impacted when they actually do happen
- Ensuring you have agility within your plans and preparations so that your team can be flexible enough to pivot when things don’t go as planned
- Threats in the EU – The group also discussed threats that they considered to be potentially high impact/high probability or medium probability/high impact. The threats that are top of mind include:
- Climate change, extreme weather, and the ongoing energy crisis
- Geopolitical instability
- Ransomware and, in turn, loss of data
- A global recession
While this session covered a lot of ground, it was informative for our clients to hear how other Fusion users are anticipating, preparing for, responding to, and learning from the various types of risks in this new age of disruption.
The Journey Towards Operational Resilience
We ended the month’s last Community Exchange with a topic that we love to talk about: where practitioners are at on their journey towards operational resilience. There was plenty of engagement from financial services organizations, technology and data service providers, and health insurance organizations. Not to the surprise of many, the financial services industry is further along in their journey due to evolving regulations. It is worth noting that as we see this progression with the financial services industry, other industries are also beginning to embrace the concepts and frameworks of operational resilience and apply them to their organizations.
A common pain point discussed by non-financial services industries was gathering data from different parts of the organization so that they can have a more holistic view into how all of these functions operate. As we are all familiar with, this is a feat that cannot happen overnight, and practitioners must push to show the value of their program in order to receive executive and board-level buy-in.
Connect and Learn Through Fusion’s ENGAGE Events!
We hope you enjoyed reading about our informational and engaging February Community Exchanges! If you would like to attend any of our future Community Exchanges, please register for them here.
Interested in diving deeper into each of these sessions? The recordings are available on Fusion Central.
