Carol Williams

3 Best Practices for Factoring Risk into Your Strategic Planning Process

June 8, 2017

No one enjoys strategic planning exercises. They conjure images of a stuffy room filled with executives in dark suits, stacks of paper strewn across the table, and whiteboards covered in scribble. Even in the most collaborative organizations, each executive represents his own department as he vies for the few dollars set aside for yearly projects.…

5 Critical Steps to Cultivating a Positive Risk Culture

May 22, 2017

Your company keeps experiencing negative events like vendor(s) not keeping their commitments, product changes that weren’t received well, or people leaving the company in droves because they feel like their job has no meaning or they are not valued. Management doesn’t understand why these events keep happening much less how to address them; they just…

How to Use Risk Appetite and Risk Tolerance to Guide Decisions

May 16, 2017

The goal of risk management, especially enterprise risk management (ERM), is to provide management (and the entire company) with valuable insights for risk-informed decision-making. But day in and day out, decisions are being made that don’t reflect what is voiced in the risk appetite statement approved by executives. Growth is being stifled, and the company…

Handling Unrealistic Expectations of Enterprise Risk Management

May 3, 2017

You have been told to put together an enterprise risk management program. Oh, and by the way, they want X, Y, and Z in 3 months. After picking your jaw off the floor, your head starts spinning with the impossibility of meeting those expectations. What do you do? You think that there is only one…

Rescue Your ERM Program’s Reputation with Branding

April 25, 2017

Your organization has long had a risk management department or an insurance department. Now that leadership is committed to having enterprise risk management embedded into the organization, you are struggling to get buy-in on how this idea is different from what you already have. How do you overcome this to achieve success with ERM? People…

An Enterprise Risk Management Program is NOT One-size Fits All

April 21, 2017

Designing an ERM program involves a lot of experimentation based on your company’s leadership, culture and operations The board and/or executives have decided to establish an enterprise risk management (ERM) program. You have been given the responsibility of designing an ERM program for your organization and have established that they are in it for the…

Supply Chain Risk Management – Ensuring You Can Handle a Vendor Outage

April 11, 2017

Questions and considerations for making sure your company can stay in business during supply chain disruptions A recent white paper published by Transvoyant titled “A Revolution in Risk Management” discusses the use of data analytics and artificial intelligence in supply chain risk management. While it was extremely interesting how companies can use the evolution…

How Well Does Risk Management Adapt to Changes?

April 6, 2017

There have been so many articles published about regulation changes, economic crises in various countries, even major shifts in executives. With all these constant changes, risk management must become flexible. How well are we, as risk management professionals, adapting to those changes? Back in 2011 and 2013, I saw articles from Harvard Business Review and…

Is the Enterprise Risk Management Process in Shambles?

March 31, 2017

I recently wrote two articles referencing the latest report from the Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) Initiative at North Carolina State University, in partnership with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). Their 8th State of Risk Oversight report provides an overview of ERM practices for a variety of industries. This report continues to provide…