The Visibility Gap
Translating technical reality into board-level insight that satisfies regulatory oversight
DORA Article 5 makes your executive team explicitly accountable for ICT risk in your organization. Boards must maintain ultimate responsibility for managing ICT risk, approve and periodically review the digital resilience framework, allocate appropriate resources, and receive recurring, structured reporting on operational resilience. This creates a governance challenge that extends far beyond traditional IT oversight.
Turning technical metrics into board-ready insights
Your monitoring infrastructure collects granular technical evidence at the system level for audit teams and regulators. Meanwhile, your board needs strategic insights they can actually comprehend and act upon. The translation layer between these two worlds - technical detail and business decision-making - is what's missing in most organizations. National competent authorities conducting DORA supervisory reviews are explicitly examine board-level engagement. They expect documented evidence that your executives:
- Understand which functions are critical to operational continuity
- Regularly review operational resilience metrics and incident trends
- Actively approve testing programs and respond to control deficiencies
- Understand concentration risk around third-party providers
It represents one of the most common DORA compliance failures observed in supervisory reviews. Boards that don't fully grasp their digital resilience posture can't make informed decisions about resource allocation, risk appetite, or strategic resilience investments.
Strategic steps to overcome this blocker
1. Develop a digital operational resilience reporting framework
By developing a framework for your board, you're translating DORA compliance into protecting the business, not just satisfying regulators.
Organize resilience information around four levels:
- Strategic Level: Present your overall risk appetite and resilience goals relative to your business strategy
- CIF Level: Report operational resilience status for each Critical or Important Function, including control effectiveness and incident trends
- Risk Level: Provide consolidated views of ICT risk exposure, concentration risk, and third-party dependencies
- Investment Level: Connect resilience improvements and regulatory requirements to resource allocation decisions
2. Implement digital operational resilience reporting
Many boards now request regular reporting and dashboards providing intuitive, at-a-glance understanding of digital resilience posture. Effective resilience dashboards answer the questions your board cares about:
- Are we operationally resilient right now?
- Which CIFs face the highest risk?
- How quickly are we remediating identified gaps?
- Are third-party providers meeting performance expectations?
- Where should we be investing resources?
3. Establish clear escalation pathways
Document escalation criteria specifying when technical findings must be elevated to executive committees and when board notification becomes mandatory. For example: "Any incident affecting a CIF that exceeds our impact tolerance threshold triggers immediate executive notification with a board update at the next scheduled meeting."
Clear escalation pathways ensure critical risk reaches decision-makers without drowning your board in routine operational details.