What is BOS?

Business Operations Shock (BOS) is a development of the "Operational System Shock" technique used to develop counter-terrorism policy. It is a visual framework that engages stakeholders to identify only critical drivers of the overall objective. BOS defines only “critical” interventions as those that are the most vulnerable, i.e. an impact would have a large adverse effect on the capability or objective. If a lower level intervention is disrupted the intervention at the level above will not be realised thus adversely affecting the capability

BOS allows for a common understanding for all stakeholders to agree which investment option(s) are necessary to achieve the capability and to highlight an “intervention pathway” or a selection of options that collectively realise the desired capability.

Structure of BOS frameworks

A BOS framework consists of a "tree" or hierarchy of critical nodes.

Each "node" in a BOS framework consists of 3 parts:

• Effect (or property): The required outcome, state desired from the node
• Element (or generator): The activity, task, action that causes the effect
• Conductor (or controller): The operator of the element

At the highest level of the tree sits the overall capability or focal effect. The Effect at a lower level is critical to the succeeding Effect of the level above, e.g. The focal Effect “F” can only occur when the Effects 1, 2, and 3 are present. Each successive level is linked via the critical relationship between the Effects. 

Application of BOS frameworks

BOS can be used in two ways:

• Vulnerability analysis: By investigating the impact or probability of risk to each part of each node it is possible to understand where and by how much your overall "Business Operation" is vulnerable to "Shock". This is similar to the original OSS technique, used to identify vulnerabilities in terror organisations,
• Ideas generation: By defining the specific Effects, Elements & Conductors of a system it is possible to generate new ideas for imporvement in a much more structured way than traditional brainstorming. This is particularly useful when new ideas are required to solve a heavily constrained problem (e.g. making changes in public sector bodies). BOS allows the entire problem space to be defined up front and hence ensures that a wider range of people can contribute, allows a more even distribution of time for ideas generation across the problem space (rather than focussing on the "same old" areas), and focusses thinking on the 3 distinct elements.

Example: Fire Safety at DIEMconsulting's offices

An orthodox definition of combustion is represented by the ‘Fire Triad’ used in fire safety. According to the fire triad combustion requires fuel, an oxidant, and ignition. Remove one of these and combustion does not occur, hence they are all critical. Therefore, a simple BOS for fire safety at DIEMconsulting would be as follows: