Noggin Blog

 
Touted as the “first ever factual thriller on British television¹,” Hunted, a ShineTV reality programme, chronicles the journey of 14 ordinary Brits, given £450 and told to vanish. The goal: evade capture for 28 days.

Many people suffer from information overload, whether it be too many emails, calls, texts or social media messages. But in an emergency situation, too many alerts can have dire consequences.

There has been widespread adoption of notification systems for emergency notifications at a raft of different levels of government globally. There are sometimes agreed structures in place for who notifies which geographic region – based on incident, first responder status and so on. However, there is a growing sentiment that there are too many alerts, and  the combination of alerts which can occur when a major incident happens are causing people to turn off their messaging altogether.

Risk management and incident management typically operate as separate silos within an organisation but bringing them together has its advantages.

First and foremost, it strengthens organisational resilience which in an ideal world encompasses all “5R’s” of resilience:

1. Risk Reduction – Risk management and analysis
2. Respond Effectively – Incident management

The cloud has reached the state where now it is getting difficult to remember a time in the modern world without it, and the same goes for its use in businesses. With cloud expenditure is set to soar to a record $70 billion in 2015 alone, most organizations utilize at least a few cloud services, be it data storage or increasingly, products known as Software as a Service (SaaS). This refers to software that is hosted in the cloud – external servers – which means the costs traditionally associated with hosting software and data – including storage, maintenance of servers, as well as all compliance and security costs are mitigated.

Geospatially aware risk management is a relatively new concept that has been made possible through recent innovations in satellite technology, mapping improvements and widespread adoption of Global Positioning System (GPS), which has seen almost every modern smartphone and mobile device have access to real time location tracking. 

The role of Chief Risk Officer (CRO) is not a new one and you’ll find many amongst the leadership teams of banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions. In fact, an Ernst & Young report issued last year on banking risk management showed the role of chief risk officers has “increased markedly since the [financial] crisis; 81% report either to the chief executive offer or jointly to the CEO and risk committee”. We’re witnessing this trend in other industries as natural disasters, increasing regulatory requirements, threat of terrorism

Most risk plans are extremely complicated and difficult to implement. As a result, you may find yourself spending a disproportionate amount of time identifying and planning for new risks compared to actively managing your risk plan and implementing effective controls.

I lay down with my son the other day on a park field, for one of those archetypal father-son moments. We were looking up at the clouds, discussing what the shapes could mean. He saw a dragon in one. I saw a tea cup. I made my case persistently for the tea cup, but he saw only the dragon. Eventually we settled on a dragon drinking tea.

Cloud computing too has suffered from being a mixed metaphor. The term has evolved from being about where and how the software was delivered - i.e. desktop versus via the internet or cloud, and now also

To us, this makes perfect sense given the high levels of resiliency, redundancy and scalability offered by cloud computing. And so we’re not surprised to also see many organisations turning to cloud-based enterprise risk management software as a service. These include airports, security and emergency service providers, healthcare services, intelligence agencies and others with mission critical operations. According to GCN (Mar 2014), “Cloud-based GRC solutions are a logical step for agencies that need to address new rules, consolidate systems and serve their mobile workforce.”

Globally, IDC expects expenditure on risk information technologies and services to grow to $79.2 billion in 2015 and $97.3 billion by 2018, representing a 7.2% compound annual growth rate. Enterprise risk management expenditure covers credit risk, market risk and operational risk domains.

Michael Versace, global research director, IDC Financial Insights, comments: "Growth in risk management investments continues to lead all functional areas in terms of dollars allocated to hardware, software, and services that run the financial markets. With growth continuing to increase, firms must place their risk functions