Last year I was offered the opportunity to transition from an intern to become a full-time employee in KRM22’s London headquarters. One major initiative I wanted to be involved in was to assist with the adoption of one of our risk products for our company’s internal use.  

The product is our enterprise risk solution, The Risk Cockpit.

Initially I was concerned I lacked the technical knowledge to be successful in this role.  As my technical abilities progressed, I found that there was a more fundamental aspect that determined the success of onboarding a system like this.

The key to the Risk Cockpit becoming a valuable tool in any organisation, but especially at KRM22, is to create one central location that stores all risk related information powered by automated data flows. This allows the system to show the risks and empower the user to track the initiatives needed to reduce risk of achieving our corporate objectives. 

When I first became involved in the project my primary task was to get information from underlying systems into this central location.  This system uses APIs (Application Program Interfaces) to “plumb” the information from one system into The Risk Cockpit.

At the beginning of the project the focus was on the integration of entire systems in one swoop. During our first system integration we imported over 200 metrics with specific filters applied at the same time. Trying to do all of this at once became very frustrating, not just because we stretched the limits of what the APIs could provide, but by bringing such a large set of data all at once, we blurred the discussions with key users around individual metrics and assessing their importance.  

As the project progressed, I began to interact more regularly with department heads about their requirements. This led to a change in the way we configured the system.

We progressed to providing smaller, more manageable pieces of information each time we updated the system.  The success of this change led me to what I believe is the most valuable lesson I learned, the benefits of working in small batches and focusing discussion around the question of “What is one piece of information you feel you are missing?” 

Asking this question leads managers to identify the major blind spots they feel they have and identify the risks they may face. Time taken to complete the integration and deliver value to the users became shorter and led to increased manager engagement and tapped into their creativity. 

One of my favourite parts of an integration is when you spark a manager’s creativity. When you have a manager’s creativity it often leads them to identify requirements they had not previously considered.  This is key as it leads to a comprehensive understanding of their risk framework. 

One of the reasons I chose to start my career with KRM22 is because we truly believe in the value our solutions provide. There is no doubt that adopting one of our key risk systems for our internal use is a great example of this.

We have worked hard to ensure we have one central location that stores all risk related information and cut costs and waste by eliminating multiple spread sheets by pulling information directly from underlying systems. Getting to this point has had its challenges, but we now are able to build on existing integrations quickly by operating in small batches.