OREA: Operational Risk Enterprise Architecture

What impact does change have on Operational Risk? As Boards of Directors and Executives try to cope with increased market competition, organizational restructuring and mergers or acquisitions; complexity becomes exponential. Change has a monumental impact on risk exposures and consequences.

Adaptive continues to be a leader in the creation of effective Enterprise Architectures to manage risk on a global scale.

Many organizations have difficulty effectively tracing how their strategies are implemented and how resources are used across the organization. Every year, millions or even billions of currency is lost on mismatches between strategies, processes, performance targets, roles and responsibilities, human resources, IT applications and projects to improve all these.

Top executives recognize that effectively managing an organization requires a clear understanding and alignment of several key factors. However, they typically lack the tools they need to manage the complexity involved. This is where Adaptive's Top Slice Architecture comes in.

To continuously adapt to their changing environments, executives must know about, keep in balance, and communicate several things:

What exactly are the strategies of the organization and how should they be implemented? (Strategy Development and Organizational Change)

What are the processes the organization executes, how are they integrated, and how do they contribute to the strategy of the organization? (Business Process Management)

How are human resources being utilized and whether there is optimum use of skills and resources available across processes and functions? (Human Resource Management)

To what extent is the organization chart a proper reflection of appropriate roles and responsibilities, in order to effectively and efficiently carry out all work?(Organization Management)

What IT applications are available in the organization, how do they interface and what processes and functions do they support? (IT Portfolio Management)

How does the performance of each process, each function and each individual add up to the organization's performance? (Performance Management)

What projects are currently underway, how do they effect and impact change, what processes and IT applications do they change and how does this contribute to the strategy of the organization? (Project & Program Management)

Companies who are in highly regulated industry sectors are perfect examples of organizations who must rapidly adapt to new laws, government mandates and must remain proactively compliant. How can you effectively keep pace in managing risk without an Enterprise Architecture? Simply stated: It's literally impossible.

Can you visualize how information flows through your organization? In order to report new information to regulators you first have to know what applications and databases are impacted by the new law or a request for additional data. Without a repository of metamodels to start with, you won't know where to begin.

In the context of Operational Risk Management, Enterprise Architecture enables the construction of end-to-end visualization of the information flows from any point (e.g. origin, final report, any intermediate point), in a form suitable for both business and technical users: and also allows the linkage of the technical definitions to business term descriptions.

If your Operational Risk professionals are not working side by side your Enterprise Architects, maybe it's time you booked that conference room for a few weeks.