Risk intelligence

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Risk intelligence is a concept that generally means "beyond risk management", though it has been used in different ways by different writers. The term is being used more frequently by business strategists when discussing integrative business processes related to governance, risk, and compliance.

Contents

Definitions

The first non-definitive usage of the phrase "risk intelligence" appears in the 1980s and aligns to the definition of intelligence as being information from an enemy (for example, regarding credit risk.) [1] The topic of balancing risk and innovation using information and the cognitive processes involved also appears at this time. [2] Recent usage is more aligned to intelligence as understanding and problem solving.

The US business writer David Apgar defines it as the capacity to learn about risk from experience. [3]

Deloitte Risk Advisory partner (since retired) Stephen Wagner, along with former Deloitte partner and current management consultant and risk advisor Rick Funston, defined risk intelligence as a dynamic approach to protect and create value amid uncertainty. It is an enterprise wide process integrating people, processes (systems), and tools to increase information available to decision makers for improved decision making. [4]

The UK philosopher and psychologist Dylan Evans defines it as "a special kind of intelligence for thinking about risk and uncertainty", at the core of which is the ability to estimate probabilities accurately. [5] Evans includes a risk intelligence test (RQ) in his book and on his website (below) analogous to IQ or EQ.

American financial executive, author, and Columbia University professor Leo Tilman defined risk intelligence as "The organizational ability to think holistically about risk and uncertainty, speak a common risk language, and effectively use forward-looking risk concepts and tools in making better decisions, alleviating threats, capitalizing on opportunities, and creating lasting value." [6] He has argued that risk intelligence is essential to survival, success, and relevance of companies and investors in the post-crisis world. In this latest book Agility: How to Navigate the Unknown and Seize Opportunity in a World of Disruption (2019, co-authored with General Charles H. Jacoby Jr.), Tilman describes risk intelligence as a cornerstone of organizational agility.

Comparison with business intelligence

As an emerging concept, risk intelligence shares characteristics with other topics such as business intelligence and competitive intelligence. As such, there are some in those camps who believe that risk intelligence is the set of processes for the transformation of risk data into meaningful and useful information for risk analysis, treatment and planning purposes.

See also

Related Research Articles

Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. The primary constraints are scope, time, and budget. The secondary challenge is to optimize the allocation of necessary inputs and apply them to meet pre-defined objectives.

Risk management Set of measures for the systematic identification, analysis, assessment, monitoring and control of risks

Risk management is the identification, evaluation, and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities.

In business and engineering, new product development (NPD) covers the complete process of bringing a new product to market, renewing an existing product or introducing a product in a new market. A central aspect of NPD is product design, along with various business considerations. New product development is described broadly as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale. The products developed by an organisation provide the means for it to generate income. For many technology-intensive firms their approach is based on exploiting technological innovation in a rapidly changing market.

In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models often include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.

Business performance management is a set of performance management and analytic processes that enables the management of an organization's performance to achieve one or more pre-selected goals. Gartner retired the concept of "CPM" and reclassified it as "financial planning and analysis (FP&A)," and "financial close" to reflect two concepts: increased focus on planning and the emergence of a new category of solutions supporting the management of the financial close.

In software development, agile is a set of practices intended to improve the effectiveness of software development professionals, teams, and organizations. It involves discovering requirements and developing solutions through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer(s)/end user(s). It advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continual improvement, and it encourages flexible responses to changes in requirements, resource availability, and understanding of the problems to be solved.

Information technology (IT) governance is a subset discipline of corporate governance, focused on information technology (IT) and its performance and risk management. The interest in IT governance is due to the ongoing need within organizations to focus value creation efforts on an organization's strategic objectives and to better manage the performance of those responsible for creating this value in the best interest of all stakeholders. It has evolved from The Principles of Scientific Management, Total Quality Management and ISO 9001 Quality management system.

Lean software development is a translation of lean manufacturing principles and practices to the software development domain. Adapted from the Toyota Production System, it is emerging with the support of a pro-lean subculture within the Agile community. Lean offers a solid conceptual framework, values and principles, as well as good practices, derived from experience, that support agile organizations.

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. The objectives of PPM are to determine the optimal resource mix for delivery and to schedule activities to best achieve an organization’s operational and financial goals, while honouring constraints imposed by customers, strategic objectives, or external real-world factors. The International standard defines the framework of the Project Portfolio Management

Organizational intelligence (OI) is the capability of an organization to comprehend and create knowledge relevant to its purpose. In other words, it is the intellectual capacity of the entire organization. With relevant organizational intelligence comes great potential value for companies and therefore organizations find study where their strengths and weaknesses lie in responding to change and complexity.

Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining products in a complex environment, with an initial emphasis on software development, although it has been used in other fields including research, sales, marketing and advanced technologies. It is designed for teams of ten or fewer members, who break their work into goals that can be completed within time-boxed iterations, called sprints, no longer than one month and most commonly two weeks. The Scrum Team assess progress in time-boxed daily meetings of 15 minutes or less, called daily scrums. At the end of the sprint, the team holds two further meetings: the sprint review which demonstrates the work done to stakeholders to elicit feedback, and sprint retrospective which enables the team to reflect and improve.

IT portfolio management is the application of systematic management to the investments, projects and activities of enterprise Information Technology (IT) departments. Examples of IT portfolios would be planned initiatives, projects, and ongoing IT services. The promise of IT portfolio management is the quantification of previously informal IT efforts, enabling measurement and objective evaluation of investment scenarios.

Strategic planning software is a category of software that covers a wide range of strategic topics, methodologies, modeling and reporting.

Governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) is the term covering an organization's approach across these three practices: governance, risk management, and compliance. The first scholarly research on GRC was published in 2007 where GRC was formally defined as "the integrated collection of capabilities that enable an organization to reliably achieve objectives, address uncertainty and act with integrity." The research referred to common "keep the company on track" activities conducted in departments such as internal audit, compliance, risk, legal, finance, IT, HR as well as the lines of business, executive suite and the board itself.

Business agility refers to rapid, continuous, and systematic evolutionary adaptation and entrepreneurial innovation directed at gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. Business agility can be sustained by maintaining and adapting the goods and services offered to meet with customer demands, adjusting to the marketplace changes in a business environment, and taking advantage of available human resources.

Information Facts provided or learned about something or someones

Information, in a general sense, is processed, organised and structured data. It provides context for data and enables decision making. For example, a single customer’s sale at a restaurant is data – this becomes information when the business is able to identify the most popular or least popular dish.

Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business processes is BPM. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable. Though not required, enabling technologies are often used with BPM.

In simple terms, risk is the possibility of something bad happening. Risk involves uncertainty about the effects/implications of an activity with respect to something that humans value, often focusing on negative, undesirable consequences. Many different definitions have been proposed. The international standard definition of risk for common understanding in different applications is “effect of uncertainty on objectives”.

Leo Tilman

Leo M. Tilman is an American financier, author, and a leading authority on strategy, risk intelligence, and finance. He currently serves as the president and CEO of Tilman & Company, a global strategic advisory firm. Tilman was formerly an executive at BlackRock, Capitol Peak, and Bear Stearns and adjunct professor of finance at Columbia University.

The Agile fixed price is a contractual model agreed upon by suppliers and customers of IT projects that develop software using Agile methods. The model introduces an initial test phase after which budget, due date, and the way of steering the scope within the framework is agreed upon.

References

  1. Dedijer, Stevan (1987). Intelligence for Economic Development: An Inquiry into the Role of the Knowledge Industry. Oxford: Berg Pub Ltd. p. 288. ISBN   978-0854965205.
  2. Fischhoff, Baruch (1984). Acceptable Risk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 204. ISBN   978-0521278928.
  3. Apgar, David (2006). Risk Intelligence: Learning to Manage What We Don't Know. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing. p. 210. ISBN   1-59139-954-8.
  4. Funston, Frederick, and Wagner, Stephen (2010). Surviving and thriving in uncertainty: creating the risk intelligent enterprise . Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. p.  338. ISBN   978-0-470-24788-4.
  5. Evans, Dylan (2012). Risk Intelligence: How to Live with Uncertainty. New York: Free Press. p. 288. ISBN   978-1-4516-1090-1.
  6. Tilman, L.. Risk Intelligence: A Bedrock of Dynamism and Lasting Value Creation Retrieved 2015-04-01