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Patrick M. Hayes

The work

A body of ideas about whether businesses can keep operating

These are not services. They are connected parts of one argument, developed over three decades of work across executive leadership, enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, operations, governance and risk.

Business Survivability is the central question. Integrated Assurance is the framework that makes the question answerable inside a real organization. Decision Debt, Operational Trust and AI risk describe the conditions that determine the answer.

Each idea has its own page, with related writing, books and speaking topics. They are best read in order, though none of them depends on the others.

  1. 01

    Business Survivability

    Resilience asks how quickly an organization recovers. Survivability asks whether the business can continue functioning at all when the assumptions it depends on stop holding.

  2. 02

    Integrated Assurance

    An operating model for understanding risk across organizational boundaries rather than treating cybersecurity, technology, operations, governance and resilience as separate problems.

  3. 03

    Decision Debt

    The accumulated consequence of reasonable decisions that were never revisited, and of decisions the organization no longer realizes it is making.

  4. 04

    Operational Trust

    Trust is not a sentiment inside a business. It is a working assumption that a system, process, person or vendor will behave as expected, and it is usually untested.

  5. 05

    AI and Organizational Risk

    The significant risk in AI adoption is not the technology itself. It is the speed at which decisions move into systems the organization cannot observe or explain.

  6. Also

    The Integrated Assurance Maturity Model

    A way to understand how effectively an organization has integrated assurance activity across the business, and what the next meaningful step would be.