While reading tea leaves (tasseography) won’t give us all the answers about the future of risk management, it is interesting to ponder what continuing and new risk trends 2014 may bring.

RISK TRENDS
Risk in its many forms has been and continues to be a hot topic for all types of businesses and organizations.  It has been and will continue to be a cause celebre, a topic du jour, though perhaps in some new and different ways.  Reading the tea leaves, I see some interesting things on the horizon.

• Cyber Risk – Interest in this topic ebbs and flows, and seems currently to be a big issue heading into 2014 with the recent Target fiasco helping to keep the topic on everyone’s list of concerns.  Issues to be addressed are the growing challenge of securing internal data and information systems as well as to collaborate with third parties who provide services to our organization.  Cyber-security issues related to cloud computing, corporate hackers, and the ever-increasing use of mobile devices combine to keep this risk topic on everyone’s radar.
• Big Data Risk – ‘Big Data’, the ability to extract and use the information in a meaningful way, is driving several risk trends particularly cyber risks and the nature of data security.   Companies continue to collect data on their customers, suppliers, and others and use the information to drive business.  As companies become more reliant on the use of this data and more data is shared, it is increasingly important to avoid having our big data become a huge problem.  Data breach or lost data – in whatever format – continues to be a risk that must be addressed. (Editorial:  While ‘big data’ is not new, widespread use of the term and concerns around risks related to big data are gaining attention.)
• Supply Chain Risk – Managing supply chain risks will continue to garner attention, though perhaps not to the extent seen in recent years.  Supply chain risk management is one example of the importance of the need for a coordinated effort to manage all risks throughout the organization.  Held in Chicago in July 2013, the Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM) 2nd Annual ISM Supply Chain Risk Management Conference provided an arena for professionals from the Americas and Asia to explore what is for many industries the number-one arena for risk susceptibility, the supply chain.  A broad variety of topics were addressed in keynote and breakout presentations and interactive roundtable discussions.  These included financial market and economic risks, the use of predictive risk modeling, building a resilient multi-tiered supply chain, defending against cyber-attacks, the need to increase world supply chain mitigation, political unrest, gaining executive commitment for risk management,  and the ever-present threats presented by natural disasters.

2014 – BRINGS MORE RISK
It is reasonable to trust the tea leaves when they foretell that an active risk management year lies ahead.  Additional portents for 2014 include a growing acceptance of ISO22301 as the standard of choice for business continuity management, the further maturing of cloud computing and with its aging a greater understanding of its benefits and risks, and an increasing understanding of the need to take a more integrated and coordinated approach to better managing organizational risk.

What the tea leaves do not disclose are risks we have not yet considered, that are not revealed in the tea leaves, and that are certain to surface in the year ahead…they always do.

Bio:

Betty A. Kildow, CBCP, FBCI, has been a business continuity consultant for two decades, working with a broad range of companies and organization in the development and implementation of tailored programs to manage risk.  Betty is a member of the Peer Review Panel for the Business Continuity Journal and serves as a Board Member of the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) Risk Group.  Long a strong proponent of supply chain business continuity, she is the author of “A Supply Chain Management Guide to Business Continuity” (AMACOM 2011), also available in Japanese:  事業継続」のための サプライチェーン・マネジメント 実践マニュアル, プレジデント社 (President, Inc. 2011).  She can be contacted at BettyKildow@comcast.net