The massive global management consulting company, Accenture, has just published a report finding that crisis and risk management are a much higher priority for chief executives in the wake of the global recession.
The report, “Risk Management as a Source of Competitive Avantage and High Performance, Accenture 2011 Global Risk Management Study,” notes that 85 percent of the 397 executives interviewed by Accenture said that risk had become a “driver of competitive advantage.” Almost half of those interviewed said their ability to manage risk over the long-term would be crucial to the long-term profitability of their company.
What is risk? One definition describes it thus: “the chance of injury or loss.”
Over the next two years, 83 percent of the executives indicated that they planned to invest more in risk management over the next two years. Specifically, they are looking to navigate a diverse range of risks – from cyberattacks ala the barrage that has been giving some very high-profile companies a black eye for the past few months to tools that can help manage market volatility.
Although the Accenture survey doesn’t explicitly address the role that technology can play in ameliorating or managing risk, here are three ways I believe the CIO and his or her IT team can rise to the challenge of helping companies address their risk exposure.
- Shore up your business continuity strategy. The mainstreaming of server virtualization over the past three years has laid the foundation for disaster recovery and business continuity strategies that don’t rely far less on the archiving and maintenance of physical media and backup strategies. Little wonder that the global disaster recovery market is expected to reach $22.6 billion by 2014. That’s a compound annual growth rate of around 11.2 percent. Central to this approach are investments in virtual software, storage management technologies such as continuous data protection, and the bandwidth to help keep information safe in real time. Or really close to it.
- Make use of unified communications technologies. One of the fastest growing product categories in 2011 has been unified communications, including all the adjunct applications such as videoconferencing. There is a big reason for this: unified communications promise to save money on infrastructure maintenance. They can help improve collaboration between branches as well as with key supply chain partners and consultants. It can be integrated with things like your customer database to create new means of supporting and responding to customer emergencies. By better marrying critical information – such as inventory status or prior customer service information – with incoming calls, a company can help keep existing customers happier. If they are managing properly, that is.
- Beef up your business intelligence and analytics. This is mantra your team has heard for years. But now, it is more imperative than ever that your managers and employees have the most up to date data upon which to make decisions. The information reported in many corporate social responsibility reports is a classic example. Sometime those statistics are more than a year old, which is far too old to really have an impact in today’s business climate. If your organization is making decisions based on spreadsheets that are updated once a month or even once a week, it could be at a competitive disadvantage.
