10 Effective Tech Hacks for Enterprise Business Risk Management

As the world is getting digitalized, businesses are being turned into an interconnected digital environment. This evolution doesn’t come easy and risk-free. Business threats are surfacing with more significant frequency and momentum than ever before.  

Your business is at a constant risk without proper implementation of risk management tools and services. You should be aware that you don’t stand a chance against your opponent without the digitalization of your business. 

Digitalization brings a greater risk of cyberattacks, data loss, theft, unauthorized manipulation, and eradication. You should implement proper tools to identify and eliminate those business threats to overcome the hurdles, triumph over the competitors, and stand on top of the market.  

Don’t be startled by the business threats, as you can easily overcome them before they affect your business operations. Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is all you need; to soundly carry on your business operations and achieve organizational goals.

This article will help you understand the business risks in detail, enterprise business risk management, use cases, and some top frameworks and software for your business risk management. And more importantly, you will gain an insight on the top 10 effective tech hacks for Enterprise Business Risk Management. 

Let us explore:  

What is Enterprise Risk?

First, it is important to know what enterprise risk is. Enterprise risk is anything that defies or hinders the expected outcome of an enterprise’s business strategies and objectives. Enterprise risk incorporates every internal and external aspect [factors] that has a negative impact on a business’s capability to reach its goals. 

What are the types of enterprise risk?

Enterprise risks manifest themselves in many ways, demanding a comprehensive classification. The following category presents you with the precise nature of each type, enabling you to develop and implement strategies to manage them. 

• Industry-specific [related] risk – is limited to a specific sector of an enterprise. E.g., worsening a patient’s health due to various reasons is a healthcare-specific risk.  
• Compliance risk – is when companies do not comply with the government’s set guidelines and rules such as GDPR, HIPPA, SOX, etc.  
• Hazard risk – is usually inert but possesses a potential threat to the life and assets of the company and its environment. Natural disasters and pandemics are examples of these risks.  
• Operational risk – includes various factors that disrupt everyday business operations. Hiring an unqualified worker may lead to this risk.  
• Financial risk – incorporates every threat related to finance, such as market fluctuations, equity, unproven business models, etc. 
• Strategic risk – is generally a result of improper planning, including ineffective marketing strategies, poorly-planned initiatives, etc. 

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What is Enterprise Business Risk Management [ERM]?

[ERM] Enterprise Business Risk Management – is a cluster of strategies and techniques used to prevent any occurrence or presence of suboptimal enterprise risks and generate new business opportunities. It involves a series of activities, such as identifying critical risks, prioritizing them, and implementing guidelines to mitigate or eliminate them [enterprise risks]. 

These activities build the core of any modern-day enterprise business risk management. The ultimate intent [goal] of ERM is to help businesses turn those intrinsic apprehensions and risks into meaningful guidelines to their [businesses’] advantage in real-time. 

Modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and cloud computing have accelerated and enhanced the usability and effectiveness of ERM in businesses. They help enterprises process data reserves to produce and utilize information streams to establish connections between events.  

ERM helps enterprises turn threats into useful insights enabling them to capitalize on existing risks that usually terrorize unprepared competitors. The sole reason why data resources hold a greater value than other assets in modern-day establishments is because of modern enterprise risk management. 

Goals of Enterprise Business Risk Management

Below are the top goals of Enterprise Business Risk Management to aid your business to prosper without having to worry about the potential business risks. 

1. Identification of potential and existing risks
2. Evaluation and segregation of risks based on priorities 
3. Prevention of potential risks and mitigation of existing ones
4. Efficient and practical use of available resources
5. Enhancing the quality of internal communications
6. Keeping up with the evolution of business threats through persistent improvement

What are the types of Enterprise Risk Management solutions?

Enterprise business risk management solutions are categorized into two main branches. They are as follows:

1. Enterprise Risk Management Software
2. Enterprise Risk Management Frameworks [or methodologies]

Risk management software offers enterprises automation tools to address specific tasks. In contrast, frameworks provide guidelines and recommendations to manage business risks.  

Let us go through the names of top risk management software and frameworks:

Enterprise Risk Management Software

• LogicManager
• Intelex
• Ultimaker Cura
• Integrum QHSE 

Enterprise Risk Management Frameworks [or methodologies]

• ISO 31000
• COSO
• Risk Management Framework / NIST 800-37
• Abriska® 31000 – Enterprise Risk Management

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Top 10 effective tech hacks for enterprise business risk management: 

It becomes much easier to mitigate risks if you have the right tools to analyze real-time data and continuously monitor and identify potential threats that can impact your business operations.  

Effective and practical enterprise business risk management solutions help you continually identify, capture, analyze, and address the risks or threats arising from various internal operations.  

Embedding enterprise business risk management solutions into day-to-day business operations and instilling a healthy and accountable work culture to promote easy risk reporting will help you avoid and mitigate business threats in real-time.  

Are you planning to enhance your enterprise business risk management? The following are the top 10 effective tech hacks for enterprise business risk management to get started:

1. Get buy-in on every level of the organization
2. Build a risk-aware work culture across the organization
3. Involve CFOs and their advice
4. Utilize your risk process inventory 
5. Research before implementing ERM
6. Adoption of a suitable framework
7. Segregate and address threats on a priority basis
8. Prepare risk management teams; not only a core team
9. Connect Enterprise Risk Management with IT Risk Management
10. Keep up with the threat evolution

1. Get buy-in on every level of the organization

The effective implementation of Enterprise Business Risk Management [ERM] requires acceptance at every level of the organization. ERM must initiate from the top, including board members, CEO, and senior management teams leading to the employees.  

You [businesses] must ensure the importance and reasons for ERM implementation to everyone involved in the business operations. All the levels should be aware of the implementation and have sufficient knowledge to get the best results out of the solution. 

2. Build a risk-aware work culture across the organization

It is equally important for you to establish a risk-aware work culture in your establishment. You must train your employees, hold meetings, share ideas, and provide the required tools to cultivate a proper work culture that can easily identify the possible threats and report them swiftly to the risk management teams. 

You should structure and conduct guideline training to keep every level of your organization well trained and risk-aware.  

3. Involve CFOs and their advice

Whenever you implement a new solution in your establishment, it is important to revise your existing solutions to see if they support and comply with the upgrades. 

CFOs being the financial leaders of your organization, have a good idea of the traditional and economic risks and their management. Their experience can greatly help implement the modern and structured ERMs to identify and resolve issues in real-time and prevent your company from going off-tracks.  

4. Utilize your risk process inventory 

Your company may have existing guidelines and procedures to identify and mitigate business threats. You should always consider the current programs and systems when implementing any new solution [ERM]. 

The current guidelines may have equal effectiveness, eliminating the process of installing the same feature in the new system. It reduces the redundancy of the solution and the team’s workload.  

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5. Research before implementing ERM

You should not rush when implementing an ERM in your establishment. Thorough research is a must-do for effective and efficient business operations. You get numerous options while selecting an ERM solution for your business. 

Book demos with different solution providers, learn about them in detail, use trial versions and see which solutions fit and meet your business needs. Extensive research will help you acquire enough knowledge to single-handedly operate the solutions and minimize your expenses to a certain level.

6. Adoption of a suitable framework

After extensive research, you will be able to implement a proper enterprise risk management solution in your organization. Adopting a suitable solution is integral to business risk identification and mitigation in real-time. 

If you adopt frameworks and softwares that do not meet your business requirements, you are wasting your money. You should be careful and wise to invest in any solution.  

7. Segregate and address threats on a priority basis

With the use of ERM frameworks and software, you gain the flexibility to work across the enterprise and capture potential and existing threats in the organization. ERMs will help you segregate threats under various heads, and it simplifies your task to address them based on their priorities. 

You can use ERM tools and features to gain real-time recommendations and guidelines to address the threats. It will help you simplify the tasks of teams working in risk management. 

8. Prepare risk management teams; not only a core team

Your businesses should focus on building risk-aware teams and have adequate knowledge of the business risks within existing workers and sectors. Educating and training them will develop the required skill sets to address risks or [at least] identify them and report them to the core team that handles such risks.  

Building teams within different sectors of the organization will reduce the workload of the core business-risk management team. Your establishment will have more workforce to address the threats, which increases effective and efficient prevention and mitigation of business risks.  

9. Connect Enterprise Risk Management with IT Risk Management

Before some time IT Risk Management was a part of Enterprise Risk Management, but with time it became a solo component that has its own requirements and benefits to business operations. They assist businesses to handle large volumes of sensitive data and information with optimal security protections. 

ERM works better in collaboration with IT Risk Management since they implement better risk mitigation strategies that go beyond the normal processes of ERMs. It is always better to implement both these risk management solutions together for optimal risk management. 

10. Keep up with the threat evolution

Implementing an ERM solution is not a one-off practice; it requires constant updates and upgrades to adequately meet the evolution of business risks.

As the quantity and quality [threat-level] of the business risks grow/evolve with time, you should be aware of this phenomenon and consider every possibility of upgrading your solution to meet the risk elimination requirements.  

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Bottom line:

Enterprise Business Risk Management is a massive domain that requires practical skill sets and theoretical knowledge to sustain an effective and supportive work environment by identifying and mitigating business threats in real-time. It has been growing and will only continue to grow; as you know, digitalization is a continuous process. A sciencedirect research shows how it will grow in comin years.

It requires a capable workforce to address the needs of businesses with their security and business risk management. Enterprise risk management will boom (to its maximum) within the coming years since every business sector will go digital in the future. 

To get going, you can follow the above mentioned top 10 effective tech hacks for enterprise business risk management. You can get your business insured from all the attacks and data breaches to gain a competitive advantage over your business niche. 

ERM is a sustainable business investment that you will not regret. Better late than never; get your business to incorporate a suitable ERM as soon as possible. 

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