Chief Security Officer, Chief Data Officers and silo effects
May 8th, 2014
Chief Security Officer, Chief Data Officers and silo effects
Up to 15 years ago, the “risk transfer guy” (aka “insurance guy”) was basically the person who signed insurance contracts, with a strong focus on operational risks, as they were the only insurable ones.
Nowadays Risk Managers (Chief Risk Officer) rightly consider information silos effect within their organization as critical issues to good risk management which includes reputational damages and many other non operational areas.
This is a problem that affects countries (each Ministry has its own well guarded “secrets”) as well a corporations, from the smallest to the largest.
At Riskope we find the trend to organically further fragment responsibilities within a corporation, for example by introducing positions like Chief Security Officer, Chief Data Officers, who may be acting independently from the Risk Manager, quite an interesting challenge for corporate governance, rather than a panacea.
Lately we read in a paper that “Chief Data Officers may hold the key to business growth in 2014. Data is playing a critical role across all business functions – and with this, there is an increasing need for an individual who is responsible for managing data throughout the entire organization.”
We believe that it is a very good idea to have someone “responsible for managing data throughout the entire organization”, to break through the silo effects within a corporation. However Chief Data Officers actions should remain linked and transparent to the Chief Risk Officer and the Enterprise Risk Management plan.
Our proprietary Optimum Risk Exposures (ORE) application is built around this concept of silo transparency and data on a “as need to know” basis for all concerned parties in a corporation.
Tagged with: Chief Data Officer, Chief Risk Officer, Operational risks, reputational damages, silo effects
Category: Optimum Risk Estimates, Risk analysis, Risk management
I beg to differ with your opening sentence. The icons from the past were doing enterprise risk management long before it even had a title. They stayed at their companies and were totally involved in the process. The problem developed when those icons retired and were replaced by young individuals who had no training from the former Risk Manager and were left to learn from their broker. The broker is a tremendous source of “insurance” knowledge but unless they have sat in the Risk Managers chair basically have no concept of getting involved with the business.
Granted there are some new names for todays risk but the risk is not new. There were always issues if protecting data, protecting reputation (how is this going to read in tomorrows WSJ). The timing has changed but the issues are basically still there
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