Effective risk management is becoming a key component of competitive advantage, as investors look to elements of risk management as indicators of underlying corporate quality and sustainable financial performance. This focus—coupled with regulatory pressure on corporations to have their risks well in hand—has made risk management in general, and operational risk management (ORM) in particular, increasingly important.

ORM addresses a subset of enterprise risks. ORM typically omits the purely financial risks, as it considers these risks to be at a more basic organizational level. ORM typically focuses on risk at the departmental or team level of an organization.

This briefing provides an overview of best practices in ORM and features four case studies on several corporations from different businesses that are successfully practising high-quality ORM.