It is no secret that globalization has increased supply chain risk. Along with that risk comes the opportunity to manage it. The opportunities are: site facilities in safer locations or environments, educated overseas personnel, set up of production centers closer to the sources of vital raw materials and expansion of suppliers and vendors in the supply chain. Continue reading
Whilst stronger control may improve performance in simple systems, this is not true in complex systems. A complex system cannot be controlled. However it can be influenced. And the more the system is able to adapt and learn, the greater the probability that it can be influenced or nudged into the desired state. Traditional understanding of governance and risk management has been dominated by process thinking, but in the extended enterprise we need to give at least as much attention to relationships, attitudes and behaviour. Continue reading
It wasn’t so difficult to sell and buy until the recent past, let’s say until twenty years ago. But since, financial resources have become less and less available and the future doesn’t seem to bode for the better.
Enterprises have to keep living to give to their employees the money they need to survive. Continue reading
Once upon a time, a wise corporate trainer devised an exercise for a class on agile principles. As you might know, reducing risk by “failing faster” is a core principle of any agile method … but that’s getting ahead of my story.
The exercise was pretty simple in nature – take 25 pennies, flip them heads-up/tails-up/heads-up in succession and make sure they ended up in date order with Mr. Lincoln facing the same way. There were a couple of other rules designed to leverage lean principles and the goal was to progressively beat the time it took to complete the exercise over the course of three iterations of the tasks. Continue reading
Google trends show that the level of creation in business intelligence data has slowed over the last five years and that there is a sudden upswing in what industry calls “big data.” Big data is an aggregate of structured business intelligence data combined with available unstructured data from places like social media outlets, online articles, customer ratings and scoring mechanisms such as Amazon’s rating system. Big data has become a new tool in the toolbox of corporate risk executives for determining the factors that might jeopardize the success and security of a company and its products and services.
Continue reading