… this weeks reading

There are so many interesting articles and posts that arrive in my RSS reader each week that I decided to make Fridays a weekly review post.

Where else could I start this week than with Trevor Levine’s Riskczar – and his post entitled “Playboy thongs and reputation risk“.

Trevor often finds a way to make risk management entertaining, and this title certainly gets attention. It is an interesting post that makes you think about what constitutes damage to a corporate reputation, as distinct from what gets your brand noticed and remembered.

I often think we can overestimate this reputation risk impact – as I noted earlier this week my choice of airlines is unlikely to change for these minor brand/reputation things.

When a supplier competes on a commodity basis, price is the real factor, not brand and reputation. For an entity to build resilience that would need to be understood.

From a completely different sector is Rob England’s IT Skeptic. Rob blogs in the IT Service Management space. He makes ITIL fun, or is that makes fun of ITIL?

Either way if you can make British bureaucracy from the 1960’s interesting, you deserve to be read. His recent post was titled “ITIL made easy“. I admit to being one of those certified by ITIL, but I suspect a number of folks from the Risk and BC arenas will also be able to easily relate to this post.

It is all about how you can buy ‘ITIL in a box’, how you can buy a piece of software that will roll out process and cultural change in your organisation. How you can learn an entire professional body of knowledge in 3 days – and then be certified as a professional advisor in the space at the end.

Rings very true in the Risk/BC space, where software often substitutes for process and false professionals abound.

In particular I draw attention to Rob’s closing paragraph, which can be directly translated to the challenge of creating resilience;

“if you believe in Easy ITIL you will get all that you deserve in life, starting with being removed from your current position sooner or later. There is no tooth fairy and no easy ITSM. You can’t buy a solution, and you can’t pay consultants for process. The only way to successfully improve your services is to change the way your people think and work. Get over it and grow up, or fail and waste someone else’s money.”

Finally, there are new posts on Jan Husdal’s blog again. Jan posts in an area that needs to become part of everybody’s core focus if they are interested in resilience – Supply Chain Risk. There are two posts from Jan I wanted to draw your attention to;

• Review of ISCRiM 2010 conference
  • Jan provides a review of the conference and the numerous expert speakers in this field. He has also linked the various proceedings and presentation for those who want to dive into the details.
  • An organisation that simply looks at its own internal processes and does risk and continuity processes around these can never achieve any level of resilience. Today all entities operate as part of a supply chain – offer an extended chain. It is not enough to ask to see somebody else’s Risk or BC Plan.
  • We need to understand this field of Suply Chain Risk and ensure we can apply it to our own companies and chains.
• The second post relates to ‘Grounded Risk‘
  • An interesting approach to developing framework and theory I had never heard of before. A form of research where you start with no hypothesis and simply collect data until it speaks for itself. The framework and theory is derived from this extensive amount of data.
  • Not sure that I buy the approach, but what the post does provide is an extensive list of risks and areas of concern should be included in the heading of Supply Chain Risk – in this case all derived from real world responses.
  • Just reviewing this post alone will give you a quick feel for some of the issues and areas you may want to investigate further.

I hope you find these posts interesting, happy reading.

What are you reading this week?

What got your attention?

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