Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Risk Curation

We live in a time when we are awash with information.  The internet, our Twitter feeds, our email, our Facebook, our Linked-In feeds etc. etc. bombard us with a non-stop information torrent.  So much so that we intentionally ignore so much of our information flow that we actually might be receiving less information than we did in the pre-internet / pre-social media era.  Additionally so much of the information we receive is incomplete, biased, misleading, half-baked or simply wrong.  Many media pundits argue that the new role of respected media is not news reporting but news curation – sorting the wheat from the chaff and presenting the stream of information in the most useful manner possible.
In today’s business environment, the manager is also awash in an information torrent.  In certain industries such as financial services, a lot of the flow is risk based.  Without proper curation the manager is at risk for actually being less informed about the relevant risks of their unit than they were thirty years ago when such information was much rarer and much harder to sort.  Thus a key role of the risk department is to act as the curator of risk information. 
Risk information is key to good risk management, but it is the right information at the right time that is necessary.

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