No matter who you are or where you work, risk management is relevant, even more so in today’s climate.
Around the globe, businesses are experiencing change like never before. At the same time, new regulatory requirements are emerging to govern data privacy and to standardise common business practices. As businesses evolve and adapt to thrive in a digital future, it is inevitable new areas of risk will emerge. Organisations everywhere face the challenge of pursuing fresh opportunities while simultaneously protecting themselves against damage. Damage to their reputation, customer and partner relationships, data, employees, financial position and more. Clearly, risk strategies need to keep pace with our rapidly evolving world. Implementing a governance, risk and compliance (GRC) framework is the first step to building a truly effective risk management approach. The next phase would be utilising smart software in conjunction with your GRC framework to enable an integrated, flexible risk-management structure to support your business with fast, actionable insights.Where to begin?
Start with addressing a few basic questions:- What can go wrong on the path to our organisation achieving its strategic objectives?
- What do we have in place to stop something going wrong?
- How effective are those controls?
- How will we know something has gone wrong?
- Who needs to know something has gone wrong?
- What more should we be doing?
Eight Red Flags That Indicate You Need a Better Risk Management Approach
Some organisations treat risk management as a “tick the box” exercise. This approach falls well short of an effective risk management programme. Check out these 8 signs that indicate your risk management could be improved:- You Are Using In-House Tools and Spreadsheets
- You Focus Purely on Compliance
- Risk Management is an Isolated Discipline
- Strategic and Operational Risks Are Missing or Poorly Defined
- No Controls Identified and Assessed for Risks
- De-Centralised Visibility
- No Dedicated Resources
- Lack of Executive Sponsorship
It is all too common for executives to avoid making decisions on risk management because there’s no compelling event to drive an investment decision. Until it is too late. As for any enterprise-wide deployment, proactive executive commitment is needed to drive investment, and focus on risk.
Benefits of Effective Risk Management
The benefits of effective risk management are powerful for every business and include:
- Empowering stakeholders to constructively assess and plan for and respond to risk events by having the right information, quickly available.
- Strengthening informed decision-making by offering leaders a clear, consolidated view of governance, risk and compliance and risk exposure across an entire business.
- Improving auditability and risk traceability through more efficient and effective data recording.
- Integrating risk management into all business management processes so incidents don’t become major business issues.
- Freeing up employee time to focus more on proactive risk and compliance strategies and less on reactive firefighting.
- Gaining valuable insights to enable education and training of a more risk-aware workforce.
- Having insight to risk information anywhere, anytime via mobile technology.
Getting More Out of Your Risk Management Program
There are some compelling reasons to partner with an industry recognised risk management provider like Camms:- Visibility: Understand what is happening across strategic, operational and project risk landscapes through simple, centralised dashboards
- Auditability: Capture data effectively from multiple systems to power fast, accurate auditing of risk and hazard factors
- Remediation and response: Develop control frameworks capable of responding effectively, rapidly and comprehensively to risk
- Reporting: Provide Boards, executives, and managers with the information they need, quickly and accurately, to support more informed decisions