RAPAPORT (Resilience Assessment Process and Portfolio Option Reporting Tool)

Resilience is the ability of a system, architecture, or organization to maintain critical capabilities during and following a threat or disruption. Assuring resilience can be a costly endeavor, and it requires innovative approaches in a financially constrained environment. Often these innovative approaches lead to modifications of non-materiel aspects of a system or organization; such aspects include emergency response planning, organizational culture or structure, and training. The impact of these modifications is challenging to quantify.

This report is the result of a project that sought to identify non-materiel solutions for improving the resilience of the U.S. space enterprise and to develop an analytical approach for evaluating the impacts of the potential improvements. The authors conducted a review of industry methods for evaluating the materiel elements of space resilience and used concepts from those methods to develop a process for evaluating the non-materiel resilience of a system. The process and the tool they developed for performing resilience calculations and presenting the results — Resilience Assessment Process and Portfolio Option Reporting Tool, or RAPAPORT (available at www.rand.org/t/TL184) — have broad applications to any organization seeking to enhance resilience.