Operations Risk Management

Introduction

In today’s world of business and IT complexity, the risks to business operations have never been greater. Businesses simply cannot operate without the IT systems that underpin them. The increasing number of changes and their frequency due to both internal and external events, brings major challenges. The wide variety of technologies, architectures, languages and systems are all interwoven to provide the complete application portfolio that runs the business. If not well understood and managed, this portfolio can present huge risks whenever changes are introduced. Micro Focus can help by providing automated and accurate information across the entire application portfolio.

CIO / Executive

Your business has to respond quickly to changing market pressures and scenarios, while trying to stay ahead by implementing innovations that provide real business value. Unless your IT department can grasp a full understanding of the IT systems and the business processes surrounding them, then any change introduces an unknown and immeasurable amount of risk that could cause great cost or damage to the business.

One of the key challenges for any CIO is to ensure that IT can respond effectively to any emerging business requirement and minimize risks such as loss of business continuity, downtime, data errors – all which lead to loss of customer satisfaction. IDC says that it is critical for CIOs to be able to articulate the business value and risks that IT brings to the organization especially in front of the board. If you rely too heavily on key individuals, or you are seeing your IT workforce creeping up towards retirement age, then now is the time to act to ensure that the risks of introducing change do not increase and jeopardize your business.

Micro Focus helps by automating the discovery and documentation of your current application portfolio, allowing you to fully understand the impacts and risks of proposed changes across all IT systems and associated processes. 

Architect

As a member of the CTO office and IT architecture staff, you will likely be responsible for assessing, reviewing and planning IT platform changes and as such, ensuring that the correct architectural and technical considerations are being met. The ability to understand the entirety of the existing IT landscape has an important bearing on what options are available and how best to manage change and risk. The first logical step would be to take an initial audit of that landscape to document and understand exactly what business rules and processes make up the current way of working. Then, within the context of this knowledge and important metrics, it should be possible for you to review and assess the IT portfolio to determine what could be used, re-used or re-architected to respond to business needs in a way that presents the least risk to the business. 

Micro Focus solutions allow you to automate this important discovery and documentation process, helping you reach the most risk-free architecture and design choices through the use of metrics and a thorough impact assessment based approach.

Technical

Since your organization’s business processes are actually defined by the rules within the IT systems, then as a developer, you are actually introducing a risk to the business every time you make an IT change. Today’s applications can be large and complex, having grown from the maintenance and enhancements that have been made over the years. Micro Focus can help you uncover these rules and determine, with accuracy, the interdependencies that exist, enabling you to make the appropriate changes more rapidly, safe in the knowledge that the effects and impacts on other systems and processes have been fully understood.

Conclusion 

Management and control of risk cannot be overlooked. Precise understanding and management of your application portfolio is a key enabler to risk reduction.

For large companies, it can often be difficult to control the risks associated with necessary changes due to imprecise knowledge of the business processes and interdependencies within your IT application portfolio. To plan and implement essential changes based on assumptions and estimates rather than true facts will introduce significant business risk which could manifest itself in the most severe way. A more scientific approach is required to assess the impact of changes and control the risks. APM, as the name suggests, is designed to manage this application portfolio, and promotes a professional low-risk approach by taking the guesswork out of the assessment and planning phases of change.