Enterprise Risk Management

CHAPTER 1Enterprise Risk Management: An Introduction and Overview

JOHN R.S. FRASER

Vice President, Internal Audit & Chief Risk Officer, Hydro One Networks Inc.

BETTY J. SIMKINS

Williams Companies Professor of Business and Professor of Finance, Oklahoma State University

It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but those that are the most responsive to change.

—Charles Darwin

WHAT IS ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT?

Enterprise risk management (ERM) can be viewed as a natural evolution of the process of risk management. The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) defines enterprise risk management as: “… a process, effected by an entity’s board of directors, management and other personnel, applied in strategy setting and across the enterprise, designed to identify potential events that may affect the entity, and manage risk to be within its risk appetite, to provide reasonable assurance regarding the achievement of entity objectives.” The COSO definition is intentionally broad and deals with risks and opportunities affecting value creation or preservation. Similarly, in this book, we take a broad view of ERM, or what we call—a holistic approach to ERM.

Some sources have referred to ERM as a new risk management paradigm. As in the past, many organizations continue to address risk in “silos,” with the management of insurance, foreign exchange, operations, credit, and commodities each conducted as narrowly focused and ...