Our world has forever changed. The many reasons for this change we watch every day on the news. Every evening on the nightly news we watch people from around the world struggle with the coronavirus (COVID-19). Our schools, malls, restaurants, bars, gyms have all closed. Even St. Patrick’s Day was cancelled. Talk about “the luck of the Irish”.
Even for those of us who did our due diligence, as we should have, and developed and implemented a pandemic plan, we hoped this day would never come. We hoped that everything we planned for would just slide on by and we could rock on… business as usual. However, unfortunately, as you read this, everything we’ve worried over and our worst-case scenarios for a pandemic are playing out.
We woke up one morning to the news that the flu outbreak in the remote village of Wuhan, Hubei, China had been recognized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). Our nightmare became reality.
Pandemic planning is a regulatory requirement for most organizations and before COVID-19 it was a “check-box-Charlie” drill. Regulators asked for pandemic plans as part of the business continuity and disaster recovery planning and we dutifully developed them. Our testing consisted of table-top exercises. Frankly, very little real testing was ever performed, and the examiners found it still sufficed.
Were we doing more harm than good? Not really. We were doing everything our organizations allowed us to do at the time. It’s all we knew.
I think most of us realize that our employers will be doing pandemic planning differently going forward. In particular, we will be required to exercise our pandemic plans in real life at least once every year. No exceptions.
And, vendor management is about to become a whole lot more interesting. The current ways we all operate are going to change and the reality of a new way of working sets in. Vendor management will mature as a discipline at a phenomenal rate due to all the changes that are coming.
How we operate from day-to-day will forever be changed after the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 as major obstacles always create change. For example, cloud computing got a massive push to maturity during the last economic recession as it was more cost-effective than self-hosting. Change, though inevitable, sometimes moves at a snail’s pace until something radical forces the pace of change to accelerate.
These alterations to processes will make vendor risk management more important than ever before. Essentially, these changes will lead to more information being handled by more vendors.
That is, more vendor selection, risk assessments, mountains of due diligence, contracts to review and a whole lot more ongoing monitoring. Think about all the fourth and fifth parties that’ll be utilized to make all these changes happen. Just like the pace of change that occurred when the last recession hit, this will happen at a rapid rate. Keep in mind, as mentioned above, that most of this will likely be done by personnel working from home, too.
And, if you’re curious, in supply chain management the supply chains will become more diverse as manufacturers seek to stabilize the raw materials that they need for everything from microchips to bullets. Diversifying supply chains is easier with the cloud and AI.
Organizations will analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the future of work will start accelerating. They’ll keep the solutions that are working and make whatever changes they deem necessary to enable our future of work. Oh, and by the way, if you’re using spreadsheets and SharePoint to manage vendors, you’ll need to start looking for a vendor management platform in the very near future or it’ll prove challenging to keep up with the pace of these quick changes in vendor risk management.
Pandemic planning needs to be included in your vendor's business continuity plan. Learn what else you need to know. Download the infographic.