Business Continuity and Organizational Resilience Across the Disaster Management Cycle: A Public-Private Common Operating Picture Framework

Abstract

Disasters and complex emergencies disrupt not only public safety systems but also the organizations, infrastructure networks, supply chains, utilities, healthcare providers, logistics systems, and service sectors that communities depend on for continuity and recovery. Although business continuity management is often treated as an internal organizational responsibility, major disasters show that continuity cannot be achieved by individual organizations acting alone. This article uses a qualitative document-based conceptual analysis to examine how business continuity and organizational resilience depend on public-private coordination across the disaster management cycle. The analysis synthesizes business continuity and organizational resilience standards, emergency management doctrine, Community Lifelines guidance, situational awareness theory, public-private coordination research, supply chain resilience literature, infrastructure interdependency theory, and emergency information systems research. The findings show that business continuity gaps are often coordination, dependency-visibility, information-sharing, and recovery-tracking problems, not only internal planning failures. The article develops a six-component Public-Private Common Operating Picture framework that integrates risk intelligence and dependency mapping, public-private information sharing, critical service continuity coordination, infrastructure and supply chain visibility, operational recovery tracking, and resilience learning. The article contributes to disaster management and business continuity scholarship by reframing business continuity as a public-private disaster resilience function and by positioning the Common Operating Picture as a human-led decision support mechanism for connecting organizational operations with community lifeline stabilization and operational recovery.