16 August 2015

Decision Advantage: Operational Risk Strategic Vision...

When the Board of Directors asks for a report on the Operational Risk Strategic Vision for the enterprise, will you have it ready?  The execution of strategy with the discipline of Operational Risk Management (ORM), requires a look "Over-the-Horizon" (OTH).  Why?

You have to realize the pace at which technologies are advancing.  You have to realize how your competitors are creating a decision advantage.  How will you apply the use of new data science, advanced hardware and software capabilities to augment your Human Capital, to replace Human Cognition?  So what are some of the categories that you should be researching, testing and implementing?   New strategic systems to secure, protect and improve the situational awareness or resilience of your organization?

Many of the places you will need to address, have to do with enhanced processing and management of data, from disparate places:
  • Coping with Scale - Advanced Analytics
  • Very Large Dataset - 4D Visualization
  • Data Standards and Governance - Sensor Priority Processing, Optimized Data Movement
Bringing tools to the data, data trust and provenance tracking, are a subset of governance.  Machine translation and wire speed language recognition, are subsets of a Multi-lingual textual data processing platform.

So what?  Why is all of this innovation required in the modern Operational Risk domain and why is it so important?  The simple answer is, international competition, from your adversaries.  Dynamic, Smart Metadata, metadata relationships and data that finds the analyst, are challenging areas today.  Natural language processing techniques and wire speed data tagging are vital.

"Data Mining will bring us "Cyber Situational Awareness", "Human-Assisted Machine Learning" and "Pattern of Life modeling".  Decision and intelligence advantage, is the key to many of these strategic initiatives."

Again, from a business perspective, so what?  If your organization is in the Information Technology Sector, then of course you understand that the competition is tough and your new advanced VM and/or shiny systems "Box" does need to stand out, with it's unique features and differentiators in the marketplace.  It must have some value-proposition to the customers, that few or no one else can provide at the moment.  Otherwise, why would you spend the money on educating the market, writing a check to Gartner, advertising, sales and business development?  Right?

The Board of Directors today might just understand the concept of "Decision Advantage."  What if you went to the next meeting of the outside directors and provided a narrative and presentation on "Decision Advantage"?  You want them to authorize the substantial budget for your own Operational Risk R&D.  You are asking them to invest in the future risk mitigation of the enterprise, that they have a fiduciary responsibility to safeguard for the shareholders.

You see, you are way behind the international competition.  When you view this visual of the current state-of-play going on this hour, this minute and this second, you really don't have the time to waste on authorizing more resources, to address many of the areas previously discussed here.  The future of your enterprise and the livelihood of your country is at stake.

The Research & Development (R&D) budgets for Operational Risk Strategy execution are tremendous.  Add it all up.  The question is, how effective is it for the enterprise to spend risk management and mitigation funds in each individual department of IT, HR, Marketing, Sales, Finance and Facilities.  Without a complete understanding and vision of how the spectrum of risks, threats and mitigations, are all interconnected and what tools, processes or technology are actually interdependent.

When something such as Enterprise Risk Management or even National Security is so mutually dependent,  (depending on each other) you have to ask the Board of Directors to pause, and to require the Operational Risk Strategic Vision.  Once completed, you will see what new technologies to invest in for your total budget of Research & Development funds, and where to spend it.

Perhaps the most important reason for this vision, is also to ensure your "Intelligence Advantage"...