See the Shared Dependencies Behind Every Critical Service
Shared services and BPO stay resilient when the providers, platforms, locations and teams behind each critical service are mapped as one operating model. This episode covers concentration risk, subcontractor dependencies, recovery assumptions and where to start with one critical service.
Episodes feature AI-generated hosts discussing human-written IGX360 research.
You can see every provider, platform, location and specialist team behind a critical shared service, and know before a disruption which ones several services depend on at once. The route is to map each critical service end to end as one operating model, so concentration, substitution options and recovery assumptions sit in one picture rather than in separate continuity plans. You already hold most of what you need: the continuity plans each business unit keeps, your supplier contracts and registers, and the service descriptions your shared centres and providers work to.
This episode follows a set of well-run local continuity plans that each pass review while, out of sight, forty units rely on the same identity verification service. It explains why a disruption spreads through authorised, trusted connections faster than firewalls or local plans can contain it, and why an outage at one provider can reach several services and clients at once. It works through the questions that bring shared dependencies into view: which critical services run through the same provider, platform or location, which subcontractors sit behind your primary providers, how quickly you could name every service an outage affects, and which recovery assumptions have never been tested end to end. A four-hour recovery target means little if the shared database behind it takes twelve hours to restore. The episode draws on ISG’s view of governance that scales with AI, which treats governance across AI, platforms and complex supplier ecosystems as a board-level priority, and on ISO 22301, the international standard for business continuity management systems, which sets out how to identify disruption risks, plan response and recovery, and keep priority activities running.
The practical starting point is one critical shared service. List every provider, subcontractor, platform, location and specialist team it relies on, and mark which of them other critical services also use. IGX360 Insights shows which of the service and process descriptions behind that map you can stand behind, who owns them and how current they are, so your recovery planning starts from information you can trust. Which of your critical services would you map first?
Want to see what this looks like on your own process architecture? One conversation is enough to start.