Over a decade later since the Arab Spring of 2011, our planet has witnessed the growth of personal mobile communications and the explosion of the Quantum "Internet of Things".
The utilization of wireless mobile communications and its intersection with social media apps in our emerging nations civilian environments is here to stay.
How these latest digital consumer-based applications have been now leveraged for situational awareness (GPS) and information operations is exploding across the emerging nations, where the mobile Internet is now gaining even more ubiquitous use.
What this also means for our risk managers in the C-Suites of major technology companies is a heightened sensitivity and awareness to the ways your tools and capabilities could be utilized in the hands of the wrong end user.
No different than the early days of unleashing certain web tools like Metasploit, to help understand our digital vulnerabilities within the confines of the corporate enterprise.
These same new open-source “App tools” could be utilized by nefarious cyber forces to quickly exploit the unknown weaknesses in our own U.S. government and corporate network systems.
Yet like many inventions by our mission-driven mankind, they can be used for good and simultaneously for evil in the hands of a certain person.
Operational Risk Management in the high technology sector (Ai?) will be just as much of an imperative for continuous compliance as the manufacturing and international shipment of products from Barrett or the manufacturers of Detcord.
The "Export Control" compliance mechanism is here to stay and companies who operate in the new age of emerging social media via mobile technologies, will need more effective OFAC internal controls.
Operational Risks may exist within the business processes that you use with your international sales and business development organization.
When was the last time you had a compliance-based OFAC discussion within the ranks of the C-Suite at your new emerging technology company?
Are you fully funded by the VCs and ready to sell your new encrypted FinTech or social media app for Android to the world?
Innovative organizations need to make sure that part of the roll out strategy, encompasses the effective conversations with the correct government departments.
This is also to determine the right process and the online tools available to better understand where and who you can sell your products to outside of the United States.
The worlds last “Arab Spring” and the next organized movement utilizing social media and satellite mobile Internet technologies that include encrypted messaging, GPS and live video, shall be even more closely scrutinized by internal compliance officers and the regulatory watchdogs domestically and abroad.
Yet the most effective internal management tools going forward, may just lie in the same ones used by your own Mother and Father growing up.
The ethical and the growing moral arguments in many cases can have a dramatic impact on young people at an early stage in their lives, as you hand them their first mobile phone as a parent.
Perhaps it is still not too late to remind and reinforce and to emphasize the fact that our exponential High-performance computing (HPC) cyber environments, are powering nothing more than the digital mirror image of the physical world we already know about. Both Good and Bad.
Our future of effective enterprise Operational Risk Management (ORM) online and the effective compliance with potential legal sanctions, may well begin with a heart-to-heart conversation at your next company executive retreat or “All-Hands” fire side chat meeting...
