Risk as an Enabler
Most organisations see risk as something to eliminate or mitigate - few see it as an opportunity. Considering the risk of not doing something (opportunity loss) does not properly factor into too many business cases - outside of financial sector that is.
As a decision maker (be that management or board level) I’d expect to see analysis of risk from a 360 degree perspective - don’t just tell me about an aging asset that’s coming end of life, tell me about the risk of sweating that asset a bit more.
The risk benefit of change must outweigh the risk of change, otherwise we probably shouldn’t be investing in the change - too often that level of analysis is just never done. Projects are depicted as ‘no brainers’ when in reality there’s more to the story.
A good example is the end of life of Microsoft Windows XP. Many organisations find themselves scrabbling to meet a date in 2014 at which the operating system official goes out of support. How many of those organisation have challenged that 'drop dead date’ and looked at the risk profile of postponing an upgrade by a few months (perhaps up to a year)?
Now I’m not suggesting that upgrading is the wrong way to go, but if you step back and have a good look at your organisation then how much out of support software do you really run and do you really need to be battening down the hatches in preparation for some arbitrary date? The operating system will continue to work just fine after that date. Perhaps some of those other business projects would offer the organisation more benefits than upgrading from Windows XP? What’s the opportunity being lost?
Organisations need to challenge the myopic risk thinking (and FUD) and see the opportunity in risk discussions - see risk as an enabler.