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The Basics of Cyber Risk Management

New technologies, increasing digitization and globalization are transforming customer behaviors, operations and business models, presenting huge opportunities for business success, at the same time driving up cyber incidents .As organizations embark on their digital transformation journeys, it is imperative that they also assess possible threats presented by these new technologies.

Traditionally, the focus for risk management has exclusively been on protecting value. However, in today’s digital economy, there has to be a shift from value protection to value creation. How best can you leverage risk management to benefit from new technologies and digital innovation?

Companies that are placing a higher emphasis on value protection and risk avoidance are most likely to find themselves behind the packing order. On the contrary, those organizations that are approaching risk management the appropriate way and establishing better ways to address cyber risk are in a unique position to achieve greater competitive advantage and superior business performance.

Cyber Risk Should Become a Strategic Imperative

As the number of reported cyber incidents continue to escalate, it shows that cyber risk is now a top tier business risk. This means cyber risk management must become a strategic priority. The challenge for many C-suite executives and boards is that they lack a deeper understanding of cyber risk and its implications on the business.

This lack of deeper knowledge and an understanding of the cyber threat landscape is making it difficult for many executives to make meaning conversations around the topic.

Although cyber risk is everyone’s responsibility within the organization, boards and C-suite executives play the ultimate oversight role. They have to make sure the organization has a functioning cyber program that is aligned with risk appetite and threshold.

As one of the members of the C-suite, in partnership with the CEO, the CFO can play a critical role in ensuring that there are frequent discussions around the strategy table concerning cyber risk.

Risk and performance are interrelated, and since the CFO is mainly responsible for organizational performance improvement, s/he possesses the business acumen and analytical capabilities to create awareness of cyber risks and provide regular reporting to the CEO and the board.

The business environment is increasingly complex and so is the enterprise risk landscape. Successfully driving performance in this environment therefore, demands the board and C-suite level to have a deeper understanding of risks capable of derailing strategic execution.

In other words, these senior personnel must develop a positive risk mindset and as well as the ability to ask the key performance questions. This is necessary to gauge the organization’s cyber risk exposure and build cyber resilience.

It is therefore, critical that boards and C-suite executives stay informed about cyber threats and their potential impact on the organization’s strategy execution, reputation, financial and operational performance.

Understand the Nature of Cyber Threats and Attacks

In order to effectively manage cyber risk, it is important for senior executives and their teams to have thorough knowledge and full awareness of the different types of cyber incidents. Over the past few years, cyber crime has grown from simple cases of theft and fraud. Cyber threat has grown to include digital terrorism, government sponsored hacks, disruption of services, corruption of data, Man in the Middle (MITM) attacks, malvertising, rogue software, ransomware and advanced persistent threats.

The above cyber incidents can all result in the organization incurring huge tangible and intangible costs. Organizations that have fallen victim to cyber criminals can attest that the aftermath cost are detrimental to the long-term survival of the business. Costs incurred by these organizations include regulatory penalties, legal damages, financial compensation to affected parties, loss of competitive advantage, loss of customer and business partner trust and ultimate damage to the organization’s reputation and brand image.

How is your organization’s track record in terms of documented cyber attacks and data breaches?

Having an experienced and knowledgeable leader surrounded by a capable team is key to ensuring that the organization has the traits to detect, monitor and proactively respond to cyber threats and attacks.

Today, stakeholders are placing higher confidence in leaders who are exhibiting greater risk awareness and have sound strategies in place to protect business assets against unknown threats.

Important to note though is that cyber risk management goes beyond technical. Not everyone needs to be an IT Security specialist.

Having business acumen and enough appropriate knowledge to engage in intelligent conversations concerning cyber security and risk is key to grasping the fundamentals of cyber risk.

Embed Cyber Risk into the ERM Framework

Having an enterprise-wide cyber risk policy that is approved by the by the board and embedded into businesses’ ERM framework. The cyber risk program must take into account all the aspects of the business that are susceptible to attacks and data breaches. Are there adequate security controls in place? Does the organization have capabilities to detect and monitor vulnerabilities?

Moreover, KRIs and KPIs must be developed and monitored regularly. This will help immediately identify any threshold and performance breaches, and in turn, escalate such breaches to senior management.

When cyber risk is part of the ERM framework a cyber-aware culture is promoted, which means cyber risk management becomes an everyday part of the business. People will take own responsibility for the management of risk and proactively involve others when needed.

The board and C-suite should set the right tone at the top in order to ensure there is a buy-in at the lower levels. If the top level is not concerned and ignorant of cyber risk, it is extremely difficult for the lower levels to prioritize cyber risk management.

Thus, it is important that when executives talk about cyber risk, they do so openly and honestly using common language that promotes shared understanding throughout the organization.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Thanks for sharing:

Related posts:

  1. The CFO’s Role in Cyber Security
  2. Identifying and Dealing with Cyber Risks
  3. Unlocking the Business Benefits of Integrated Risk Management
  4. Formulating an Enterprise Risk Management Policy
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The Art of Risk Management

This is the title of the article by BCG published a few years ago. The article discusses the principles that should govern the approach to risk management by companies of all shapes and sizes.

The authors make several points with which I agree. Here are some excerpts:

  • Risk management is essential in today’s volatile economy. In a continuously changing economic environment, companies cannot assume a stable risk landscape.
  • Stop thinking of risk management as primarily a regulatory issue. Embed risk management in the mindset of the broader organization.
  • Risk management is a value-creating activity that is an essential part of the strategic conversation inside the company. The goal of that discussion should not be to eliminate or minimize risk but to use it to create a competitive advantage.
  • Risk management starts at the top. The organization needs to demonstrate that it has made risk management a high priority and an integral part of the decision-making process by appointing a dedicated risk leader who reports back frequently to the CEO and the board to discuss the latest trends and any changes in the company’s risk scenarios.
  • Risk cannot be managed from an ivory tower. Risk Management should not exist in isolation from the rest of the organization, with an insufficiently granular understanding of the actual business-specific risks the company faces. To avoid this outcome, integrate risk management into the company’s entire routine management processes, including planning, capital allocation, controlling, and reporting.
    • Understand the scope of the risks the company faces.
    • Plan for how the company will manage those risks.
    • Act to mitigate the risks or take advantage of strategic opportunities.
  • Avoid relying on black boxes. Although sometimes appropriate, over-reliance on complex metrics or models can muddy the risk management process, turning it from a transparent management activity into a frustrating black box. The appropriate level of complexity is company-specific and depends on the industry, business model, availability of data, level of experience, and mandatory legal requirements.
  • Align risk management with a company’s overall business strategy. Companies need to identify all relevant risks – not just those that can be easily quantified. Some of the relevant risks for a company may be those that are qualitative and especially difficult to quantify.
  • Risk management is more than a policy; it is a culture. The objective of a company’s risk-management system should be not only to enforce new policies but also to create a risk-aware culture that addresses risks proactively, not reactively, and manages them to create new sources of competitive advantage.
  • Effective risk management depends on the free flow of information throughout the organization. Unless employees at all levels of the organization are actively involved in the risk management process, it will be difficult to maintain the unrestricted flow of information. This can result in the most important data getting buried in one part of the organization unavailable to other parts of the business.
  • Risk management deals with uncertain futures. As a result, the goal should not be to develop precise metrics or future outcomes but to strive for a general understanding of the probabilities and potential impact of various trends or scenarios on business performance and enable decision-makers to confront the uncertain nature of risk and act accordingly.
  • Risk management is never about finding “the answer.” Rather, it is about continually refining the organization’s assumptions about the future and its understanding of the implications of those assumptions for the company’s business. Assumptions about risk often change quickly, so the relevant parameters, probabilities, impacts, and correlations should be revisited frequently.
  • It is possible to prepare for unknown risks by building an organization that so excels at crisis management that it is resilient even in situations in which it is blindsided by unprecedented challenges. For example, through developing the ability to detect, capture, and exploit information patterns as well as to think outside existing frameworks and risk landscapes.
  • Avoid the downside, but don’t forget the upside. Companies should use risk management also to identify new opportunities and to exploit them systematically. For example, scenario planning should be used to define not only worst-case scenarios but also best-case scenarios. Think in advance about how a company can make the best use of the latest market developments and trends and ultimately make the right decisions.

I enjoyed reading the article and highly recommend it.

Thanks for sharing:

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Leading in Uncertain Times

One of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today is making the right decisions that will ensure their organizations succeed, survive, and remain competitive in an increasingly uncertain and complex environment.

A recent post, The best way to lead in uncertain times may be to throw out the playbook, by Strategy+Business has several good points.

The article is about the COVID-19 pandemic, how global companies navigated through the crisis, and how best to prepare for future disruptions. Here are some key points and my comments.

  • Rather than follow a rigid blueprint, executives must help organizations focus on sensing and responding to unpredictable market conditions.
    • Comment: Senior leaders play a vital role in providing clarity about the organization’s strategic direction, creating alignment on key priorities to ensure the achievement of enterprise objectives, and ensuring the business model is continuously evolving to create and capture value in the face of uncertainty. They must not rest on their laurels and stick to the beliefs and paradigms that got them to where they are today and hope they will carry them through tomorrow. Regulatory changes, new products, competition, markets, technologies, and shifts in customer behavior are upending many outdated assumptions about business success. Thus, the businesses you have today are different from the ones you will need in the future hence the importance of continuously sensing changes in the global economy. Employees and teams often feed off the energy of their leaders and tend to focus their attention where the leader focuses attention. If the leader is comfortable with current business practices and rarely embraces the future or challenges the status quo, then the team is highly likely to follow suit.
  • When it became clear that supply chains and other operations would fracture, organizations began scenario planning to shift production sources, relocate employees, and secure key supplies.
    • Comment: Instead of using scenario planning to anticipate the future and prepare for different outcomes, it seems most of the surveyed organizations used scenario planning as a reactionary tool. Don’t wait for a crisis or a shift in the market to start thinking about the future. The world is always changing. As I wrote in The Resilient Organization, acknowledge that the future is a range of possible outcomes, learn and develop capabilities to map out multiple future scenarios, develop an optimal strategy for each of those scenarios, then continually test the effectiveness of these strategies. This does not necessarily mean that every change in the market will impact your business. Identify early warnings of what might be important and pay closer attention to those signals. In other words, learn to separate the signals from the noise.
  • The pandemic forced the organization’s senior management team to re-examine how all decisions were made.
    • Comment: Bureaucracy has for a very long time stood in the way of innovation and agility. To remain innovative and adapt quickly in a fast-changing world, the organization must have nimble leadership and an empowered workforce where employees at all levels can dream up new ideas and bring them to life. Identifying and acting on emerging threats and potential opportunities is not the job of the leader alone but every team member. To quote Rita McGrath, in her book Seeing Around Corners, she writes, “Being able to detect weak signals that things are changing requires more eyes and ears throughout the organization. The critical information that informs decision-making is often locked in individual brains.” In addition to the internal environment, the leader must also connect with the external environment (customers, competitors, regulators, and other stakeholders), looking for what is changing and how.
  • It’s worthwhile for leaders of any team to absorb the lessons of sense-respond-adapt, even if there is no emergency at hand.
  • Sensing: Treat the far-flung parts of your enterprise as listening stations. The question leaders must ask is, “What are we learning from our interactions beyond the usual information about costs and sales?” Train your people to listen for potentially significant anomalies and ensure that important information is not trapped in organizational silos.
    • Comment: Cost and sales data are lagging indicators that reveal the consequences or outcomes of past activities and decisions. Although this information can help leaders spot trends by looking at patterns over time, it doesn’t help understand the future and inform what needs to be done for the numbers to tell a different story. In addition to lagging indicators, pay attention to current and leading indicators and understand the relationship between these indicators and outcomes.
  • Responding: Improve communication across intra- and inter-organizational boundaries. Leaders should view business continuity as an essential function that acts as connective tissue for the enterprise.
    • Comment: In addition to creating mechanisms that allow the free flow of information both inside and outside the organization, decision-makers should also be comfortable receiving information that challenges their personal view of the world, even if it’s not what they want to hear. Create a culture of psychological safety where people are not afraid to share bad news for fear of getting punished, but rather are acknowledged and rewarded for speaking up. Leveraging the diversity of thought enables leaders to anticipate the future as an organization, decide what to do about it collectively, and then mobilize the organization to do what’s necessary.
  • Adapting: Challenge assumptions, and question orthodoxies. There’s always the temptation to mitigate threats simply by applying existing practices harder and faster. One way to get at those deeper issues and encourage double-loop learning is to ask, “What needs to be true for this to be the right approach?”
    • Comment: In an increasingly uncertain environment, it’s difficult to survive and thrive with an old business model or outdated technologies. Many businesses fail because they continue doing the same thing for too long, and they don’t respond quickly enough and effectively when conditions change. As a leader, stay curious and connected to the external environment, look for market shifts, understand what needs to be regularly refreshed and reimagined, adopt new technologies and capabilities, and adapt in ordinary times but also during times of transition. Unfortunately for many leaders, it’s just more convenient for them to continually downplay the fact that conditions are changing than take the appropriate course of action that drives business success.

How are you preparing your organization for potential future disruptions?

Thanks for sharing:

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The Collaborative Organization

These days the term collaboration has become synonymous with organizational culture, creativity, innovation, increased productivity, and success.

Let’s look at the COVID-19 pandemic as an example. At the peak of the crisis, several companies instructed their workers to adopt remote working as a health and safety precautionary measure.

Two years into the pandemic, they are now asking their employees back to the office full time or are planning to adopt a hybrid model.

The need to preserve our collaborative culture and accelerate innovation are two of the top benefits being cited by organizational and team leaders for bringing workers back.

Collaboration is indeed essential for the achievement of team goals, functional objectives, and the overall success of the organization.

Today’s breakthrough innovations are emerging from many interacting teams and collaborative relationships.

When teams, functions, and organizations collaborate, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; group genius emerges, and creativity unfolds.

But, what makes a successful collaboration? What are the key enabling conditions?

  • It extends beyond the boundaries of the organization. Business success is a function of internal and external relationships. Instead of viewing your business in vacuo, understand that you are part of an ecosystem. External to your organization, who do you need to partner with to enhance your value creation processes, achieve/exceed your objectives, or successfully execute your strategy?
  • Ensure the objectives are clear and there is shared understanding by everyone. Unclear objectives are one of the topmost barriers to team and organizational performance.
  • Foster a culture that encourages opinions and ideas that challenge the consensus. People should feel free to share their ideas and not hold back for fear of others penalizing them or thinking less of them. Collaboration is hindered when one or two people dominate the discussion, are arrogant, or don’t think they can learn anything from others.
  • Groups perform more effective under certain circumstances, and less effective under others. There is a tendency to fixate on certain topics of discussion amongst groups which often leaves members distracted from their ideas. To reduce the negative effects of topic fixation, members of the group should be given periods to work alone and switch constantly between individual activity and group interaction.
  • Effective collaboration can happen if the people involved come from diverse backgrounds and possess complementary skills to prevent conformity. The best collective decisions or creative ideas are often a product of different bodies of knowledge, multiple opinions, disagreement, and divergent thought processes, not consensus or compromise.
  • New technologies are making collaboration easier than ever, enabling us to increase our reach and broaden our network. Although new technology helps, it will not make your organization collaborative without the right culture and values in place. First, define what you want to achieve through collaboration then use these tools to promote creative collaboration.

How else are you championing collaboration within your organization to create value and succeed?

Thanks for sharing:

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