Software for Risk Management
The world continues to witness turbulent events that impact on our organisations and those stakeholders who depend upon our organisations’ goods and services.
Increasingly, the risks that emerge reflect a plethora of issues that cut across all activities of the organisation at both strategic and operational levels making identification, review and tracking of mitigating actions an administrative burden that is easily removed through use of software.
Cloud-based software for risk management need not be expensive but through testing the market organisations can identify user friendly software that is easily configured and ready to use almost instantaneously.
Selecting the right solution for your organisation will remove the burden of managing risk through multiple spreadsheets and provide extensive and flexible reporting functionality through digital registers and informative dashboards; giving users and the Board an immediate and real time view of the risk landscape that the organisation is facing whether a Charity, working within the Public Sector or in a commercial setting such as Financial Services or Manufacturing.
Effective implementation of risk management software will allow the organisation to consider and evaluate risks against specific corporate objectives, thereby determining where success or failure is likely.
At an operational level where key performance indicators are in place, implementation can provide insight regarding the risk that particular targets will not be achieved at an operational level.
Choosing and implementing appropriate software for risk management therefore provides multiple benefits that organisations would be remiss to ignore, no matter what the size, complexity and geography of the enterprise.
The obvious advantages relate to the savings in administration both in terms of updating content or in terms of extracting and compiling bespoke reports for meetings – so much simpler simply to plug in a laptop and share a screen – in the office, from your virtual office, while travelling in the UK or Internationally – in short from wherever you have a safe internet connection.
By investing in software for risk management, organisations will gain collective insight which should enable faster decision making through driving the focus of agendas for strategic and operational meetings, ensuring that which matters most is prioritised.
Where risk culture is mature this would support prompt response to fast changing risks and the allocation of immediate tasks to react to the changed risk landscape, ensuring the organisations remains in control should a business-critical incident emerge.
The less obvious but probably more beneficial rewards come from the use of technology to ensure appropriate delegation of risks and the allocation and tracking of actions to allocated to other managers and employees.
Where risk management processes fail it is often due to a failure to successfully embed the organisations Risk Management Policy throughout the organisation, as a result not establishing an effective risk management culture in which buy-in from all is achieved.
Risk Management Software allows prompts regarding delegated actions and reminders regarding formal reviews that have been allocated to managers, ensuring through an Administrators dashboard that a birds-eye view of activity, or lack of it, is available.
Consequently, an effective risk management software solution is at hand, user friendly software based on the three lines of defence theory is likely to represent good value for money, not only providing savings in dedicated resources but also ensuring the ‘at a glance’ reflection on the current risk environment is to hand.
The step up from spreadsheet-based approaches to automated software for risk management can also have wider implications for good governance.
A solution based on three lines of defence theory should also provide:
1 – An effective policy management repository
This allows organisations to store and update policies and procedures and links to provision of evidenced documentation supporting the first line of defence.
In a regulated industry, similar advantage would be gained by holding regulation or guidance as a secondary folder within the repository therefore ensuring that critical regulation was always available.
In both cases, a formal audit trail would provide evidence of circulation of updates and details of those having accessed them.
2 – Integration with internal audit and other assurance sources
Through identification of the existing key controls which are being relied upon to mitigate identified risks, there is direct alignment with the requirement to undertake risk based internal audit and consider wider sources of assurance that are available.
3 – Action tracking capability
Will allow full integration of recommendations arising from internal audit reports to be managed within the risk management processes therefore ensuring that a single point of refence is available for all risk-based action reporting to Senior Management or Audit Committee.
These matters do however also raise the potential for further integration with other risk related reporting and monitoring systems – related matters regarding Complaint Management, Incident Reporting and Whistleblowing may have implications for managing the risk environment, so much better if all are available in a single software platform that provides for joined up thinking regarding the administration of risk related events.
If you would like us to give you an online demo of RiskMate so we can show you how it can help you manage your risks more effectively, please complete our online demo form.