Christmas in September! COSO released its ERM Framework

Christmas in September!

COSO released its highly anticipated ERM Framework: “Enterprise Risk Management – Integrating with Strategy and Performance”

The much anticipated release of The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) “ERM Framework: Enterprise Risk Management–Integrating with Strategy and Performance” is finally here! I was like a kid waiting for Christmas day in anticipation of this new update to the COSO ERM framework.

As an ERM professional I have always placed a tremendous emphasis on ensuring that the organization understands the risks to their strategy and how best to manage those risks to provide a reasonable assurance that they can meet their objectives. With this new release COSO is clearly showing that managing the risks inherent to strategy are paramount to the overall success of the organization.

The top-down approach is simply the best way to ensure your success because you are aligning the risks at the strategic level and those from your operational/tactical level to ensure everyone is basically pulling the oars in the same direction. Simply understanding your operational risks without any context on how they impact strategy keeps you from potentially realizing your objectives in the most effective and cost-saving ways possible.

“ERM is as much about understanding the implications from the strategy and the possibility of strategy not aligning as it is about managing risks to the implementation of the strategy and business objectives,” said Dennis Chesley, PwC’s Global Risk and Regulatory Consulting leader and Project Partner for the COSO ERM effort. “This update answers the call for a stronger emphasis on how enterprise risk management integrates from strategy through implementation and performance.”