|
Chapter
| Enterprise Risk Management: Today's Leading Research and Best Practices for Tomorrow's Executives
| 2009
Becoming the Lamp Bearer: The Emerging Roles of the Chief Risk Officer
by
Anette Mikes
|
Abstract
Enterprise risk management, under the leadership of chief risk officers (CROs), has the promise to bring enterprise-wide risks, which threaten the achievement of the firm's strategic objectives, into the open and under control. Its organizational significance is that, by providing a process to identify, measure, monitor, and manage uncertainty in strategic decision-making, strategic planning, performance management, and deal-approval processes, it enables top management to maintain or alter patterns in risk-taking. This chapter addresses the question: How may CROs realize that organizational significance? I draw on the existing practitioner and academic literature on the role of CROs and on a number of case studies from my ongoing research program on the evolution of the role of the CRO. I outline and illustrate four major roles that senior risk officers may fulfill: compliance champion, modeling expert, strategic controller, and strategic advisor and discuss the contingencies that shape the mix and effectiveness of these roles in actual organizational settings.
Keywords: Governance Controls;
Managerial Roles;
Risk Management;
Business Processes;
Risk and Uncertainty;
Citation:
Mikes, Anette. "Becoming the Lamp Bearer: The Emerging Roles of the Chief Risk Officer." Chap. 5 in Enterprise Risk Management: Today's Leading Research and Best Practices for Tomorrow's Executives, edited by John Fraser, and Betty Simkins. John Wiley & Sons, 2009.