Mobile Risk: What are you really carrying with your smartphone?

Kevin Bacon had his stolen in New York, British Major General Gerry Berragan had his pick-pocketed on a train in China, President Obama may still have his hacked, and at any point in time thousands of smartphone owners could be running information-leaking viruses without knowing it.

Living in an increasingly mobile and connected world changes the boundaries and realities of risk. When you carry the world at your fingertips you take with you risks that, if not properly managed, can bring about huge loss.

Of major concern are risks surrounding viruses, theft and loss. These risks can affect the protection of employee and customer information, your company’s reputation, your intellectual property, and your competitive advantage.

How do we put ourselves at risk?

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Aon Identifies Top Three Risks in the Retail Industry

Aon recently released a report that outlined the top three risks identified by the retail industry. The report found that these top three risks were also in the list of top ten risks that the retail industry was the least prepared to face.

These risks are of concern to the retail industry because of three characteristics; their complexity, their difficulty to control, and their enterprise-wise affect and scope.

What are the top three risks?

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Examining Strategic Risk – What is it – Why Should We Care? Part 2

One of the reasons for the lack of academic research about strategic risk is the confusion as to what is ‘strategic risk’. Many of the early ERM adopters are at a preliminary assessment in which they treat enterprise risk management as an extension of their audit of regulatory compliance processes. Other organizations are at a more advanced stage, in which they quantify risks and link them to shareholder and risk-transfer decisions.

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Supply Chain Risk Management: Balancing Flexibility and Vulnerability

Supply chain management is largely about interconnectedness. When planning for and managing the sourcing, procurement, conversion and logistics related to your product offering, companies need to create the right relationships with the right companies. This will help to optimize the movement and storage of materials and inventory while at the same time preparing for disruptions. Striking the right balance is not easy.

If you stretch your supply chain too thin, you subject it to vulnerability and leave room for disruption in your operations. If you don’t actively seek ways to improve your supply chain and its processes, you’re missing out on the ability to make related operations run more effectively and efficiently.

Globalization and new market realities that allow just-in-time manufacturing, outsourcing and lean manufacturing have further complicated supply chain management. While it brings great opportunity to companies big and small, it also brings considerable risk. If you do it right, a flexible and optimized supply chain can not only free up resources within the organization, but it can also decrease the cost of goods and increase the number of markets that you can occupy. However, mismanage your supply chain, and a disruption can decrease revenue and market share, and can increase costs considerably.

When one of the links in the chain fails, what do you do?

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Examining Strategic Risk – What is it – Why Should We Care? Part 1

Within the management literature, most organizations have viewed the process of risk management primarily as an issue of compliance with statutory or regulatory requirements. Risk management within organizations has traditionally occurred within specific areas – technology, regulatory, financial, environmental etc. – with little or no coordination. Major ‘risk’ events such as September 11, Enron, WorldCom and the recent financial crisis made it increasingly apparent that the processes, policies and procedures of managing organizational risk must be a cohesive, constant analysis of both the internal and external organizational environment.

After the major ‘risk’ events of the last twenty years, the literature suggests a concentration on compliance with statutory regulatory requirements as the driver for risk management within an organization may not be an effective motivation for the management of risk.

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Communicating in a Crisis Situation

A fire has destroyed your manufacturing facility that produces 80% of your products. Your staff has nowhere to work, your suppliers have nowhere to ship goods, and your customers start looking for new suppliers. Now what? Read more

How to Protect your Company’s Communications with E-mail Policy

In the wake of a large-scale online denial of service attack made possible through the hacking of personal e-mail accounts, we asked the LinkedIn community if employees should be able to use external e-mail addresses for work-related communications. We share their views and insights with you below.

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What is your Company’s Reputation Worth?

You’re a company that is occupying all the right places online. You have a website, you blog regularly, you tweet, and you make sure your company controls profiles on all of the major social networking sites. You’re doing what you can to make sure that you are where you need to be to create brand awareness and interest in your products.

But how do you manage all these corporate communications? How closely do you monitor online representations by and of your organization?

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Twitter Recovered from two Service Interruptions. Can you?

On August 6th, microblogging service Twitter.com was the victim of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that kept it offline and scrambling to recover for over two hours. On the 12th of August, it was again the target of a second DDoS attack that this time kept it offline for a mere 30 minutes.

While a politically-fuelled attack on multiple social networking sites may be pretty far down the list of anticipated risks, we wonder – What planning and procedures did Twitter have in place to address and recover from such an event?

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How do you identify the risks that threaten your organization’s success?

Two companies have in place risk management plans of similar quality and detail. One has worked tirelessly, dedicating an intense amount of time and money, to create a plan that meets the needs of the organization and that addresses the risk-related issues the company has been faced with in the past. They have hired consultants and other outside resources to help re-work the plan time and time again and have been waiting a long time for a plan that is customized to suit the needs of the business.

The other company came to have the same quality plan with the same level of customization with less money invested and less time spent. They cut months from their development time and were able to jump into the implementation of the plan almost immediately.

How did they do it?

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