Operationalising Information Systems Resilience Within the Financial Services Sector

The initial orientation of resilience emanates from nature and the complex ecosystem in which it operates. The information systems (IS) discipline inherently concerns complex systems within socio-technical environments with symbiotic assimilation of social and technological elements. However, current views of IS resilience are underpinned through conceptual and theoretical lenses, which raises the question of the practical implementation of realising IS resilience. This research focuses on illuminating the operationalisation of IS resilience and determining good practices for realising IS resilience. The study adopted a multiple case study approach involving two financial service organisations. Interviews and document analysis were used to gather data regarding resilience approaches and practices. The data were aggregated, themed and compared to elucidate the IS approaches and practices. The findings show that the organisations use various methods to look at systems resilience, of which SRE, ITIL, agile, DevOps and elements of project management are foremost. Research shows that organisations need an overarching conceptual model for driving system resilience activities. Our findings show that no single conceptual model drives system resilience approaches across the South African financial services sector or even within a single organisation. Furthermore, the findings provide a practical view of the approaches and practices adopted to realise IS resilience within the financial services industry. Future research should examine how SRE, ITIL, Agile, DevOps and project management can be used together to discover the most beneficial resilience outcomes.