Challenge

The Safety, Security and Resilience division of a global media organisation needed a novel tool to give early warning of emerging risks to their entire range of operational and business activities.

This Horizon Scanning tool would need to collect, fuse and filter live data gathered from multiple sources across the organisation into corporate risk profiles for 3, 12 and 24 month time horizons.  It would also need to be easy to support and maintain.

Approach

The project team worked with the client to develop a taxonomy of risks and issues using a standard STEMPLES structure (Social/ Technical/ Environmental/ Military/ Political/ Legal/ Economic/ Security).  Fourteen strategic and 11 operational risks were identified and internal (client) Subject Matter Experts were interviewed to understand and prioritise the risks, leading indicators and sources of information.

RED developed an SQL-based tool to:

1. Gather data from a variety of dynamic internal sources including calendars, spreadsheets, project plans and shared document stores;
2. Combine, mine and visualise the risk forecasts in a corporate dashboard.

Outputs

The project delivered:

1. An understanding of the under-pinning’s of horizon scanning and risk profile prediction;
2. A risk taxonomy to classify and identify risks across all news and entertainment operations;
3. Collated interview data to identify risks and sources of information;
4. A facilitated workshop to prioritise the information sources;
5. An easy to use and maintain SQL-based horizon scanning tool.

The tool provides the client with a dashboard to flag emerging corporate risks over three time-horizons with a drill-down facility to interrogate the underlying data.