Culture
How to build a risk-informed business
At the advent of the pandemic, how prepared was your organization to support customers and employees? Or to continue delivering critical products and services? How adaptable and effective was its technology, workforce, and supply chain?
As the COVID era has shown, resilience can’t be summoned overnight. It requires business and technology transformation.
Siloed risk
Such transformations take time, of course, and in the meanwhile, organizations may overlook certain issues and critical risks, or fail to implement or updated a coordinated, enterprise-wide disaster recovery plan. Response to an issue or risk can be slow and scattered.
[Find out more about ServiceNow Governance Risk and Compliance.]
“The way risk and resilience are addressed, in many cases across the enterprise, turns out to be quite siloed,” says Vasant Balasubramanian, senior director and general manager, risk business unit at ServiceNow. “Human resources are looking at people. The lines of business are worrying about their projects, their customers. And enterprise-level groups are only interested in enterprise operational risk.
“Existing tools and teams can’t keep up,” he adds. “You have manual processes; workloads aren’t connected; and there’s no transparency to data about processes, trends, performance, risks, and more. It all lives in little siloes across the board.”
Upgrading technology
For Steve Allan, ServiceNow integrated risk product owner of Lloyds Banking Group, there is a direct connection between digital transformation, operational resilience, and the organizational ability to manage risks.
A few years ago, his business went through a digital transformation, with ServiceNow playing a big part. “We wanted to leverage our new digital platform, to introduce a core data model that we could start to build on and build out to more of a service model—to monitor processes and get better at insights,” he says. “We also wanted to, in a quicker fashion, understand our compliance position and how our business was performing.”
To Allan, getting a robust data model in place on a digital platform from ServiceNow was the heart of the transformation and operational resilience, along with all the service management, automation, and risk management capabilities. It’s about having the ability to leverage data to see trends, to automatically link issues to risks. “It’s about understanding in real time what our risk and control position is.”
Adding in the human factor
Risk management and resilience require the proper technology, and equally important is embedding risk and resilience across the enterprise, Balasubramanian says. “You need to have the right information at your fingertips when and where you need it to make decisions.
“People should see risk and resilience compliance as part of their day-to-day work,” he says. “It’s important to make sure everybody in your organization can access risk and resilience information easily in one place.”
A modern, digital solution allows continuous monitoring of risks and controls. “If that information is already available, you won’t have someone running around asking or answering 10, 20, 30 questions,” Balasubramanian says.
“Build a risk-informed, resilient business and you can break down your organizational silos, reduce your related costs, make better decisions, be more resilient, and be successful,” he adds.
Learn more about how to build that business, watch the ServiceNow Knowledge 2020 session “Operational Risk and Resilience: Managing through Disruption.”
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