What Is Risk and Is Your Business At Risk?

Some telltale signs of businesses that may be in difficulty:

• Do you need to store or destroy paper documents to create room for more recent documents?
• Do you sometimes lose your business's documents?
• Is compliance a daunting challenge?
• Do you have an effective web site and integrated data base?
• Are your business policies and procedures just for show and really collecting “electronic dust?
• Would you have trouble proving that only the current version of your critical business documents are being used and implemented by your staff?
• Would you have trouble proving that your business policies and procedures had been adhered to court of law?
• Do you still print documents and compare hard copy?
• Do you have a Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Plan?
• Are you struggling to understand the convergence of technology and business?
• Would you like to increase efficiencies but don’t know where to start?
• What are the core areas of risk that effect business?

Enterprise Risk Exposure:

Obviously all the usual tasks and processes in the business will need to continue such as contractual risk analysis for legal, performance and profitability capacity, Occupational Health and Safety Management, Insurance of key risks, Human Resource Management, however these evaluations conducted under the existing processes and systems must be brought together through one electronic system, so that together the collective knowledge and systems of the enterprise may become intelligence.

By way of example there are many laws which effect injury to persons. A single work site injury whether to an employee, contractor or third party may be subject to the following laws which codify the responsibility and liability of the enterprise and its individuals both and after an injury. These are workers compensation laws and their regulations, occupational health and safety laws and regulations, product and materials liability laws and regulations, trade practices law, criminal law, corporations law, civil liability law, and even taxations law.

In addition, there will be potentially many contracts which seek to limit or transfer liability from one party to another and then to apply damages, penalties to the other party. Most contracts contain indemnities and hold harmless conditions which although can not over statute law, they can and do enforce recovery in the form actions and penalties.

Significantly then whatever identification, analysis, and management systems exist for the management of these risks, unless they are all brought together, future outcomes and results will have less meaning, significance and ultimately, may lead to loss of revenues on individual business activities and conceivably failure of the enterprise itself.

The diagrammatic wheel below categorises risks and shows how they are common to all enterprise.

By identifying, analyzing and treating risks, we know that the resources of the business are economically deployed and they will generate the maximum profits for the business stakeholders, but at the optimum level of risk.

This is where enterprise management systems bring all the endeavors together, integrating the intelligence of the business and ensuring it is shared by all and keep for future prosperity of the enterprise.