The Importance of Technology

You can drive a nail into a tree with your hand, if you are committed to striking it constantly for a few decades. Likewise, you can do risk-management without a single technological tool at your disposal. But just like a nail goes in more easily with a hammer, so too do good expert tools assist in making risk-management relatively painless. Having said that, risk-management isn’t about technology, and the primary stress is always on process. All the tools do is increase the efficiency of the processes.

While our research into “safety” drove our understanding of the current models, and their serious flaws, those understandings drove our development of tools to support risk-management approaches. What is interesting is how often the incremental development of the tools drove our understanding of the opportunities presented to do risk-management well. In most experiences the creation of a tool is to address a purpose, and so too with the primary tool we created to manage risk, but as it developed it exposed other avenues to consolidate the theories we developed.

Some of the key considerations that our research raised and our develop efforts reflected were:

• A need to simplify the actual mechanics of the data recording process, since we knew the data gathering and recording processes were always a challenge;
• A need to spread the effort requirements to engage more people in the development of risk aversion, by having the tools assist them in communicating;
• A need to monitor both data quantity and data quality, to ensure the reporting capability reported against clean data, or at least had the chance to explain the data faults;
• A need to enforce value returns by focusing away from traditional distractions toward cost-provable processes that can be measured concretely;
• A need to impose an integral relationship model that would provide opportunities for deep analysis without subjective effort, and allow for engagement of the cyclic improvement model; and
• A need to get the right information (data) to the right people.

A few of the things our development revealed as it proceeded were:

• The actual practical nature of risk factor linkage across inventory, activity, and reactive entities, leading to the theory we developed about Risk Factor Linkage and Analysis; and
• The degree of expectation we could have of dependent systems to provide good inputs, revealing methods to overcome the information technology barriers in large organisations.

Ultimately, without good tools, the cost of doing risk-management will always exceed the benefits, because the process will become clumsy, the returns will be unreliable, and your focus will end up in the wrong domain. With good tools, there is nothing to prevent risk-management becoming a profit-driver.