How Rhiza can help with risk management

It’s a dangerous world out there, as evidenced by the year-on-year increase in chief risk officer appointments confirmed in our Global Risk Landscape 2022 survey. Having a chief risk officer (CRO) on the board can certainly help businesses be more alive and responsive to threats.

However, a CRO is only as good as their team and its processes. Risk is a vast subject, covering areas as diverse as cyber security, supply chain disruption and natural disasters. How can CROs make sure all risks are accounted for and dealt with?

This is far from an academic question, not only because corporate risks can have a catastrophic impact on business operations but also because regulatory pressures are growing on companies to demonstrate they have appropriate risk mitigation measures in place.

Corporate governance

In March 2021, for example, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy published a white paper called Restoring trust in audit and corporate governance that demands the highest levels of risk reporting to date, from the widest range of businesses.

What this means for CROs is that a failure to report accurately on risk could become a risk itself. To help avoid such situations, it is worth considering tools that go beyond the standard Excel spreadsheet. And at BDO, where we make risk assessments on a daily basis, we rely on Rhiza.

This is an integrated platform that supports organisations in implementing and maintaining robust risk, control and assurance frameworks that fit their needs. It effectively helps you embed ownership, management and accountability for risk and control throughout your organisation.

You can request a free demo of our Rhiza software here and learn more about how it can help you with risk management. https://www.bdo.co.uk/en-gb/rhiza-request-a-demo.

 

What are the benefits of using a platform like Rhiza?

The advantage of using Rhiza over a spreadsheet or document-based risk register, say, is that it prevents situations where measures to deal with risks get left on the shelf.

“Spreadsheets are really bad at handling one-to-many relationships,”says James Betts, Head of BDO’s own Enterprise Risk Management. “Somebody updates the spreadsheet, then it will be sitting on somebody’s network drive, and it will be untouched until somebody asks for it.”

Similarly, spreadsheets are not ideal when it comes to capturing multiple responses to a single risk or a single response that addresses multiple risks, “which, other than in the straightforward businesses, you will inevitably have,” says Betts.

Rhiza can easily track such complex risk-and-response interactions and is purpose-built to stimulate actions that reduce risks across the organisation. Once a risk has been identified, the steps that need to be taken to manage it can be allocated to named people within the business.

The system keeps track of their progress in completing the steps, for example issuing reminders related to key milestones. This makes it easy to see how the organisation’s risks have changed over time, something else that is hard to achieve through a spreadsheet.

Furthermore, it acts as a single source of truth regarding risk, which makes reporting easier and more accurate. Finally, “it’s designed to make things simple for the user,” says Betts. “There’s always more than one way to find the thing you want.”

To find out more about Rhiza, request a free demo.