vol. XVII no. 3

				Page 4 Page 1 2 3 4 " For the more established companies who still maintain a pyramid-type of organization with rigid hierarchies and well-defined turfs, incorporating an enterprise approach will be much more difficult because the systems that hold the culture in place make it hard to change," said William Bogner, assistant professor of managerial sciences at Robinson. " As a result, older organizations will be at a great disadvantage when they go up against flatter, more flexible organizations." But according to Wang, there's still a place for silos even in an ERM environment. " The ERM perspective is a 30,000 feet view of the enterprise as a whole. But when you get closer down to business units, you may learn that local views are quite different." Wang suggests that one of the important aspects of ERM is to communicate the ERM perspective to business units, while at the same time learn from them about their local perspectives. " A promise of ERM is in encompassing many perspectives and many dimensions. ERM needs to harmonize goals between the enterprise and the individual operating units." Regardless of the various nuances of their definition and perspective of ERM and how far along the process they believe we are, ultimately most agree that it's the right direction. "Everybody is struggling with ERM because they're not quite sure how it's all going to fit together. But they realize that this is where they need to go and what they need to do," said Mutchler. Perhaps Sanjay Srivastava, chair of Robinson's Risk Management and Insurance Department, summed it up best: "I believe that measurement is still critical to the ERM process, and to that end we still have a ways to go. I don't know if we'll ever find the 'holy grail' - the measurement that quantifies the unquantifiable - but along the way we may just find something that's good enough." Previous Page | Top

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