NC State ERM Roundtable - GREAT Session from David Fox of KBR

Attended this morning's session in Raleigh for NC State's ERM Roundtable and had the pleasure to hear some thought-provoking ideas from both Dr. Mark Beasley (NC State) and David Fox of KBR in Houston. Thank you to Oversight Systems for their sponsorship of the event.

More on David's presentation later today, but for now here are a couple of resources that we know will be of interest to the ERM and Internal Audit community(s).

1) AICPA's Research on the Current State of Enterprise Risk Oversight, published April 2009.

Research by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and NC State ERM Initiative finds that while the volume and complexities of risks are increasing extensively, risk oversight is fairly immature, ad hoc, and the source of frustration for over 700 executives surveyed. Some great factoids from the survey...

• Over 1/3 of organizations surveyed note they were caught off guard by an Operational Surprise either "Extensively" or a "A Great Deal" in the last five years. Another 1/3 of organizations faced a "Moderate" operational surprise.
  
• Almost half (47%) stated that they are "Not at All Satisfied" or "Minimally" satisfied with the nature and extent of reporting of key risk indicators to senior executives regarding the entity's top risk exposure.
  

But

• 44% of organizations surveyed have no enterprise-wide risk management process in place and no plans to implement one.
  
• An additional 18% without ERM processes in place indicate they are currently investigating the concept, but have made no decisions about implementing ERM.

Said in a sentence or two...Firms have been bitten by risk, they are not satisfied with executive and board-level reporting about risk, but they're not doing much about it. No wonder ERM is so hard!

Read more about Enterprise Risk Management at NC State's very thoughtful and thought-provoking Portal.