What clients buy from a DORA advisor
Clients don’t buy DORA knowledge — they buy outcomes: a defensible answer on scope, a credible programme, and evidence they can put in front of a supervisor or a board.
The Digital Operational Resilience Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554) has applied since 17 January 2025. Eighteen months into supervision, the questions clients bring you have shifted from «what is DORA?» to «are we defensible, and can we prove it?» Your job is to convert a dense regulation and its delegated acts (the RTS and ITS) into decisions the client can act on and stand behind.
The advisor’s three jobs
- Decide — is the client in scope, and under which regime (full vs simplified)?
- Build — a prioritised, evidenced programme across the five pillars.
- Prove — an evidence file that survives a supervisory dialogue.
Where advisors lose credibility
Two failure modes recur. The first is regulation-recital advice — restating articles without telling the client what to do differently on Monday. The second is activity theatre — long lists of tasks with no link to supervisory exposure or evidence. Both feel like work; neither survives a supervisor asking «show me».
Decide
Scope memo: entity type, regime, exemptions, assumptions.
Build
Prioritised roadmap tied to the five pillars and to risk.
Prove
Evidence file: policy + operating proof + owner + dates.
Worked example. A mid-size payment institution engages you «to become DORA-compliant». You reframe the brief into three deliverables — a classification memo, a costed roadmap, and an evidence file — each with an accountable owner on the client side. Six weeks later the client passes a supervisory information request not because they did more, but because everything they did was evidenced and owned.
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