Extending IT products to address multiple business challenges is a prudent goal for every organization. Unfortunately, this goal often accompanies a strong temptation to go beyond the inherent functionality of a product designed for one purpose, swayed by marketing claims, in the hope of extending IT budgets that can lead to decreased productivity, increased business challenges, and poor user adoption.
Organizations that focus on selecting the risk management platform that can meet and adapt to their risk and business needs are far more likely to succeed than those trying to extend existing IT service management products to solve dynamic and evolving risk management challenges.
#1: Risk management involves much more than just IT risk
Recent global economic and social disruptions have proven the necessity of implementing business systems that provide decision-makers with the critical information needed to make informed business decisions concerning risk to ensure the organization's longevity and ability to achieve strategic business goals in times of crisis.
Attempting to address risks such as security, compliance, resiliency, risk quantification, environment, social and governance (ESG), and third-party governance in an IT ticketing and service management product will not meet your evolving business environment. Business leaders need a global and comprehensive view of the risks facing the organizations. These risks need to be connected from top-down and bottom-up. The technology solution should enable that convergence without causing disruption. This requires a purpose-built risk management solution to handle the multiple dimensions of risk, from enterprise risk analysis to IT security, quantification, operational resiliency, audit, and compliance.
#2: Reacting to risk is not effective risk management
Surprises are great for birthdays and celebrations, but not for a CEO waking up to a breaking news article about a security breach or compliance failure that could permanently impact their business and reputation.
Organizations that can better predict and anticipate risks rather than reacting to risks are less likely to fall victim to unwelcome surprises and unintended outcomes. The ability to calculate, analyze and extrapolate risk probabilities in measurable terms the business understands enables organizations to take advantage of risk rather than falling victim to it. Board members, senior business leaders, and decision-makers are looking for more than a "red, yellow, green" indicator of risk severity. They need measurable, quantifiable information about risk. Using IT service management and workflow products, simple qualitative guesses are the extent of their risk prediction and analysis capabilities.
While IT service management products might generate colorful graphs and charts with a rainbow of colors equating risk distribution, these charts provide little value to a person making a decision based on risk likelihood and impact that could significantly impact the business.
#3: Risk is constantly evolving
Risk is not constant. It's dynamic and continually changes and evolves. As a result, every organization has unique needs and requirements for its risk solution. These can include tracking and monitoring ad-hoc data fields, modifying workflows, creating new reports, or tracking a new risk. Your risk management solution should make these changes easy to enact.
IT service management and other workflow products are not designed nor intended to be configured and modified by risk and compliance management teams. The lack of configurability in IT service management products leads to inflexibility and rigidity and a system that cannot effectively support the dynamic nature of risk. Organizations need an integrated risk management platform capable of changing and adapting to risk to protect the business. If a platform cannot easily and quickly adapt to the risk and compliance needs of the business, what value is it providing?
#4: Operational resilience is critical
Recent times have subjected organizations to unprecedented disruptions that highlight the imperative for integrated approaches to risk management. For example, the acceleration of digital transformation spurred by the pandemic requires security and risk functions to pick up speed. Likewise, keeping pace with digital initiatives requires efforts to modernize security and risk management. Operational resilience refers to an organization's ability to absorb and adapt to rapid changes, sudden disruptions, or other challenges—and continue to achieve its objectives. Operational resilience is more than business or IT recovery after a disruption; it also includes building resilient business practices across the organization in preparation for disruption.
Organizations attempting to use IT service management products for operational resilience often fall short due largely to the product's inability to connect resiliency information to critical notification services in IT security management, audit, and health and safety sectors. This lack of connectivity leaves gaps in the capability of the IT service management products to act and adapt to changing business, environmental impacts, and social disruptions.
With so many organizations facing industry shifts, market pressures, and increasingly competitive landscapes, a focus on operational resilience makes sense. Business today is all about speed, and organizations cannot afford to let risk hinder their efforts. Implementing integrated risk management allows your risk program to keep pace with the business.
#5: Risk management must be a core discipline
Risk management is a broad and complex discipline, encompassing audit management, compliance, risk quantification and analytics, third party management, ESG, operational resilience, business continuity, IT security risk management, and operational risk management. New risk challenges driven by regulations and fueled by the dynamically changing nature of risk are constantly evolving. The only way for organizations to effectively harness and manage this broad spectrum of risk is to employ a platform dedicated to addressing risk management challenges.
With such a broad risk landscape, adjacent products like IT service management vendors claim they have the tools and capabilities needed to address the complete risk spectrum. Unfortunately, this is where the temptation by those focused on cost-cutting and operational streamlining can make the costly mistake of assuming risk management can be adequately managed by IT service management and workflow products.
Conclusion
Selecting a technology solution to support your risk management initiatives is a critical part of ensuring your program's success. The stronger your technical approach to risk management, the higher degree of granularity you can achieve when identifying, assessing, and monitoring risks. Technology can serve as the backbone of your program, offering multiple benefits such as:
Efficient and effective processes
Common data taxonomies to establish consistent internal language around risk improving communication
Data consolidation and sharing to improve analytics and empirical support for your risk decisions
Solutions that address the breadth of IT and business risk and built on deep best practices, configurability, growth path, and pedigree are critical factors to consider in the selection of your risk management solution provider. Archer empowers organizations to manage multiple dimensions of risk on one configurable, integrated software platform. With Archer, you can efficiently implement risk management processes, using industry standards and best practices to significantly improve the effectiveness and maturity of your evolving risk management program. Contact us to learn more about how Archer can help you build a robust risk management program in your organization.