Risk. A Trend Emerges.
Posted on February 4th, 2010 by Katina »Permalink
What a difference a financial crisis makes. It’s not been long since industry headlines were dominated by GRC and SOX and SoD and IdM and a host of other acronyms that folks like our dear readers (okay, and ourselves) dearly love to toss around. Now, though? It’s risk, risk, and more risk.
This week is no different. Deloitte’s CEO Barry Salzberg takes a nicely comprehensive look for Forbes at how businesses should be considering and approaching risk, and he makes some good points, especially when he emphasizes the importance of minimizing dangerous risks without sacrificing risks that can create value. As he points out, lending, for instance is risky for banks – but as headlines keep reminding us, nobody likes it when banks stop lending – and banks can’t live long without risk.
He also drives home something that we at Approva stress with our clients – how key it is to bring stakeholders across the business together to identify risks and decide how best to address them. It’s pretty unavoidable as a starting point.
David McCann at CFO Magazine makes a similar point in a big piece on just where the GRC market stands these days. He says it better than we can: “Many companies are still saddled with narrow, duplicative approaches to GRC that lead to both economic and operational inefficiencies. Extra costs accrue when, for example, several different business units and functions separately track and manage a single risk factor — especially if, as is common, each buys its own software for the task.”
This is something we’ve been talking about at Approva for ages – and one of the best things about our Continuous Controls Monitoring solutions is that they enable our clients to achieve visibility across business processes so that they can monitor mistakes and errors in real-time and inspect transactions and data to catch exceptions before they become problematic. We’ll be talking more in coming weeks about how much sense this makes for risk management – and for overall business efficiency as well.
