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Managing Risk: More Than Just Disaster Recovery
Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.
When it comes to managing risk, ignorance isn’t bliss and denial can be a formula for disaster. In this context, the ability to systematically identify risk situations in terms of their probability and impact upon occurrence requires detached objectivity and insight.
Risk management looms large in the CIO’s world. While identifying risk scenarios is not all that difficult, quantifying risk can be all together different. One of the most frustrating experiences a CIO can have is to present management with a risk management plan only to have it met with a yawn and a lackluster budget. But even worse is the CIO who fails to educate management on enterprise impacting risk-related events.
Over the past few years, companies have been hit hard by very foreseeable events that somehow escaped the CIO’s radar, only to result in the loss of tens of millions of dollars.
Risk comes in many flavors in IT, but the most critical risk is a Service Disrupting Event (SDE). An SDE is any event that stops the organization’s ability to conduct normal day-to-day business activities. These events can range from a hurricanes to a cyber attack to a simple infrastructure or implementation failure. The ability to recover rapidly from an SDE can result in a company losing millions and--worse--shut it down permanently.
SDEs are the stuff crisis and disaster recovery plans are …
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