In an era where change across all aspects of business is accelerating, the ability to adapt and grow separates the best companies from the rest of the pack. Unfortunately, this can be hampered by risk-averse attitudes and insufficient control around risk. By improving the controls landscape for your organisation, you can enable the kind of adaptability your business needs to grow.
Expansion into new service offerings, adopting new technologies or pushing into new markets carries inherent risk to the capabilities of the organisation to adapt to the requirements of that change. New business areas have risks which may not have been defined within existing controls frameworks, ownership and execution. The effort required to on-board new controls, establish testing methods and demonstrate execution can be a major factor in resisting the adoption of change.
You can reduce this effort by establishing automated controls processes and systems, reacting to new business processes, technologies and data more quickly, and placing these into your pre-existing, established control frameworks with testable, repeatable results. This is essentially “modularising” your controls landscape, allowing you to grow service offerings without the associated risk.
Automated control monitoring requires that ownership is defined for controls upfront, with the expectation that owners understand the tasks incumbent upon them. These include the operation of controls to mitigate risk, with the execution and monitoring of controls being quickly tailored to suit new requirements from the new service offerings. This allows a degree of flexibility within the business to adapt to changing customer requirements, which can reduce the risk exposure of new ventures without the usual associated delays in delivery.
So, if you want to be able to grow, you need to be able to take on the risks that growth brings with it, whether they are financial, legal, operational or reputational. Defining control frameworks with clear ownership will permit some of these challenges to be overcome, while automation of the testing and execution of controls provides confidence that risks are addressed. Giving your business the confidence to take risks but to also control them is key.
