The Hindu Business Line : IT risk is now business risk

What is IT risk? “It’s the potential for an unplanned event involving a failure or misuse of IT (information technology) to threaten an enterprise objective,” define George Westerman and Richard Hunter in IT Risk ( www.landmarkonthenet.com). And the risk is “no longer confined to a company’s IT department or data centre.”

The authors observe how a half-century of adopting IT at an astonishingly rapid rate has created a world in which IT is not just widely present but pervasively, complexly interconnected inside and outside the enterprise. So much so, “writing a book about IT risk is like writing about life.”

The book, however, focuses on ‘a critical yet often overlooked issue: the link between IT risk management and business value’, because ‘IT risk is now business risk, with business consequences.’

IT risk management has two key elements, Westerman and Hunter conclude, based on elaborate research. The first element is ‘an integrated view of IT risk’ to ensure ‘rational, informed trade-offs’; and the second, a careful emphasis on three core disciplines, viz. ‘simplifying the IT foundation, creating a risk governance process, and fostering a risk-aware culture’.

Of immense value in the book is the 4A framework that the authors have developed, for translating IT risk in business terms. The four interrelated enterprise objectives in the ‘4A’ are:

Availability — ‘keep the systems and their business processes running, and recover from interruptions’.

Access — ‘ensure appropriate access to data and systems so that the right people have the access they need and the wrong people don’t’.

Accuracy — ‘provide correct, timely, and complete information that meets the requirements of management, staff, customers, suppliers, and regulators’.

Agility — ‘possess the capability to change with managed cost and speed — for example, by acquiring a firm, completing a major business process redesign, or launching a new product/service’.

The book ends with a chapter on ‘ten ways executives can improve IT risk management’. Last in the list is ‘lead by example’, meaning, it is the top that makes the difference. Leaders must make it clear to everyone in the enterprise that risks are to be faced openly, the authors urge.

“All employees, regardless of job description, can set an example for their colleagues by sounding the alarm when risk appears… Risk management need not be an onerous extra burden but rather just another part of doing business.”

Well-argued.

Wanted, PC technicians

Good books motivate readers to learn what they are reading, says Mike Meyers in the preface to CompTIA A+: PC Technician ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com). “For example, if a book discusses binary arithmetic but doesn’t explain why I need to learn it, that’s not a good book. Tell me that understanding binary makes it easier to understand how a CPU (central processing unit) works or why a megabyte is different from a million bytes — then I get excited, no matter how geeky the topic. If I don’t have a good motivation to do something, then I’m simply not going to do it.”

Practising what he counsels, Meyers begins his book in right earnest, thus: “Computers have taken over the world, or at least many professions. Everywhere you turn, a quick dig beneath the surface sawdust of construction, the grease of auto mechanics, and the hum of medical technology reveals one or more personal computers (PCs) working away, doing essential jobs.”

With the PC having evolved from being a novelty item to essential science tool to everyday object in a short period, “there’s a huge demand for a workforce that can build, maintain, troubleshoot, and repair PCs.”

Which is why Meyers’ guide becomes highly relevant to wannabe PC technicians.

Communications, the great leveller

The cell-phone revolution in India is exciting as a sign of India’s economic transformation into a twenty-first-century success story, but Shashi Tharoor sees something more important happening: ‘a change in the attitude of our ruling classes’. The government is marginal to this success story, he says in The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone ( www.penguin.com).

“Perhaps the key contribution of the government lies in getting out of the way — in cutting licence fees and streamlining tariffs, easing the overly complex regulations and restrictions that discouraged investors from coming into the Indian market.”

Communications, in the new India, is the great leveller, declares the author. He is delighted to find cell-phones in the hands of the unlikeliest of his fellow citizens — ‘taxi drivers, paan wallahs, farmers, fisher folk’. As long as tax policies keep telecommunications costs low and it’s cheap for people to call on their cell-phones, good growth is assured in this sector, foresees Tharoor.

A chapter titled ‘calls from the centre’ is about call centres, which have become the symbol of India’s newly globalised workforce. “While traditional India sleeps, a dynamic young cohort of highly skilled, articulate professionals works through the night, functioning on US time under made-up American aliases, pretending familiarity with a culture and climate they’ve never actually experienced, earning salaries that were undreamt of by their elders (but a fraction of what an American would make) and enjoying a lifestyle that’s a cocktail of premature affluence and ersatz westernisation transplanted to an Indian setting.”

Is this not a major breakthrough for India and its people, one that countries such as Ghana and Kenya are striving to emulate, wonders Tharoor, even as he cites the counterview, such as: “All we’re doing is providing coolie labour — carrying the excess baggage of globalisation that’s too clunky for the West to bother to lift.”

A harsh judgment, rues Tharoor, about the latter. “One that’s genuinely unfair to the talent, dedication and creativity of the young people who make the call centres work. But it’s also out of date. If what India is doing is providing coolie labour, then today the coolies are scheduling the trains.” Business processes that are being outsourced are no longer just the airline reservations, customer billing or minor technical trouble-shooting, he reasons.

“Today, Indians are reading MRIs (magnetic resonance images) for American hospitals, running consulting services for global US firms, handling actuarial work for British insurance companies, analysing US and European company stocks for western institutional investors and writing software that will prevent Boeing and Airbus planes from colliding in mid-air. Hardly menial tasks.”

Great read.

Tailpiece

“You know what’s cool about the ‘cyber coolie’ job I do?”

“The air-conditioning?”

“No, that my job is so pivotal to the bigger things…”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in