Archive for the ‘Business Resilience’ Category

OpsCentre Round Table Event – Operational Risk – the convergence of People, Processes & Technology

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Operational Risk emerges from various sources; sometimes lying undetected for years, or more often, unexpectedly, catching executives off-guard.   Join us for this roundtable discussion to share your ideas and find out how your peers mitigate operational risk and ensure protection of their organisation’.

The discussion is relevant to Chief Executives, Chief Financial Officers, Managing Directors, Business Continuity Managers, Risk and Compliance Managers, and all senior executives looking to assess and mitigate risks during 2010/11.

Rod Crowder, Managing Director of OpsCentre, will facilitate an open and unbiased discussion between participants; providing an opportunity to comment and discuss individual perspectives and share related issues and experiences with each other.   He will outline a number of action areas where senior executives can gain rapid traction on this important challenge.

Operational Risk is one of many categories of risk managed by all organisations, others include; strategic, compliance, reporting, market, credit, legal, political and insurance risks.  Whilst some types relate to generation of strategic advantage or profitability, operational risk is inherent to the imperfections or errors of its people, processes and technology assets.  Organisations must assess the likelihood and impact to generate an overall rating, against which mitigation strategies can be implemented or accept a level of ‘residual risk’.

Our round table discussion topics include:

What are the major categories of operational risk?

How are organisations assessing qualitative and quantitative operational risks?

How does ‘risk appetite and tolerance’ vary across different organisations?

What strategies, methods and tools are organisations using for risk mitigation?

What operational risk management standards or ‘good practice guides’ are relevant?

What experiences do people have in responding to incidents?

We look forward to sharing your views and perspectives at our Roundtable.

When?

Thursday July 08, 2010, 4:00PM to 6:00PM

Where?

OpsCentre - Level 18, 323 Castlereagh Street, Sydney 2000 Australia

Or

Online: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/join/672734064

Audio: +612 6108 4655, Access Code: 672-734-064

Audio PIN: Shown after joining the meeting

Meeting ID: 672-734-064

Contact Rod Crowder ASAP to register your attendance.

About your Facilitator

Rod Crowder is Managing Director of OpsCentre, a boutique provider of risk, business continuity and disaster recovery consulting, software and training solutions.  He has worked in the Management Consulting sector for 17 years in a variety of management, training, facilitation, project management and consulting roles.

Rod has project managed and consulted on projects for organisations including Telstra, Lend Lease, Nestle, Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu Australia, DCA Group, Thomson Legal and Regulatory, Omnilab Media Group, Ambience Entertainment, Amity Group, Amnesty International, Integral Energy, Coates Hire, Westlink M7, Hills M2 Motorway, Franklins Foods and several Federal and NSW Government Agencies, and local councils.

He has undertaken extensive overseas consulting assignments in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, New Zealand, USA and Europe. He holds a Higher National Diploma in Computer Studies from Brighton University in the UK.

Business Continuity – Is your business ‘Recovery Ready’?

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Do you know the answers to these questions for your organisation?

1. How would we continue to function in an extended building evacuation such as a power outage or flood in the basement?

2. Who are our most critical customers and how would we contact them?

3. What is our current IT Disaster Recovery capability? How long would it take to restore our most critical systems, applications and data?

4. Do we outsource critical business functions to third party organisations services? What if they were to fail.

5. Do our staff know how to get out of our building safely, where to go, and how do we account for them?

6. In the event of a disaster, would we need to implement manual workarounds to cater for reduced staff numbers, loss of IT systems, or denial of access to our building?

OpsCentre recommends undertaking a Readiness Assessment to identify where you are exposed and the possible impacts.  If you would like assistance with evaluating the health of your business continuity program, we would be happy to assist. Don’t forget we are offering a complimentary initial consultation from which you will receive an ‘actionable’ health check report.

Click here for more information about the OpsCentre complimentary consultation.

 

Business Resilience and Agility

Friday, February 19th, 2010

We are increasingly hearing about the word resilience. When speaking scientifically it refers the physical property of a material to ‘bounce back’ to its original position after deformation that does not broaden elastic limitations.

Irregular change is nothing new to modern enterprises: witness the colossal changes in technology and economies as well as social and environmental developments. We are living in a world which is constantly evolving, changing and expanding. Enterprises need to respond by bolstering their suppleness and agility. We are constantly witnessing modification as these groups create ‘virtual enterprises’ in which they share key process with other businesses, they construct   infrastructures which support expansion, and create environments that sustain varied lifestyles.

Agility is becoming increasingly important as is resilience. We witnessed large spread change on September the 11th as the world was catapulted into a ‘new normal’, one of indecision and unrest.  Resilient organizations bounced back within a short period whilst non- resilient struggled to re-establish, and rebuild.

Agility is an offensive strategy while resilience is defensive and refers to a means of recovery from unanticipated events.  Working in a variety of different industries I believe that resilient organizations are ones which have adopted it as an attitude. It is part of their corporate culture and the product of the persona of individuals in an organization. One cannot build a durable organization on the shoulders of those who don’t embrace it. If a leader has it as a character trait then followers will more than likely follow suit as they tend to adopt similar characteristics.

Resilience begins at home and has to be sustained over time. 

Have you though about the vulnerabilities and areas of weakness in your own business and how to improve your level of operational resilience to address them?