Indicator

An indicator is a measured value that shows the state of a risk, a process or a capability before the monthly report arrives. Indicators exist to give boards and executives an early, comparable view of where attention should go this week. In resilience they cover three families: risk signals such as KRIs, process health, and the readiness of recovery capability. A board that sees tested indicators can steer; one that reads prose cannot.

Each indicator needs an owner who proposes its definition, a committee that approves it, and a place where it lives — usually the KRI register and the management dashboard. It becomes a signal only when paired with a threshold: days since the last successful DR test with a limit of 180, or a backup success rate turning amber below 98 percent. Good practice keeps the set small and tied to the organisation's limits, such as MAO or impact tolerance. Indicators without thresholds are just numbers on a slide.

The common failure is dashboard inflation — 60 metrics nobody acts on — and green statuses built on untested assumptions, such as a backup that has never been restored. Fewer indicators with honest evidence behind them beat a wall of reassuring colour. How to build evidence that indicators tell the truth is the subject of ERGP module M6 on assurance.