Identify and Manage Operational Risk Impacts on Your Organization

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More than any other time, our world is changing. As a result, organizations – and their vendors – need to be able to adapt their plans to accommodate risk on an unprecedented level.

A new threat will impact your organization's operations at some point. Make sure your plans are flexible enough to manage the inevitable consequences and that you understand where those threats may originate.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Identifying and managing a vendor’s potential operational impact on your organization requires multiple people in the organization across several functions. Those people all need coaching on the potential changes in the market and how these changes may affect operations.
Organizational leadership is often taken unaware during crises, and their plans lack the flexibility to adjust to significant market upheavals.

Impact and Result

Vendor management practices educate organizations on the different potential risks from vendors in your market and suggest creative and alternative ways to avoid and help manage them.

Prioritize and classify your vendors with quantifiable, standardized rankings.
Prioritize focus on your high-risk vendors.
Standardize your processes for identifying and monitoring vendor risks to manage potential impacts with our Operational Risk Impact Tool.

Identify and Manage Operational Risk Impacts on Your Organization Research & Tools

1. Identify and Manage Operational Risk Impacts to Your Organization Storyboard – Use this research to better understand the negative impacts of vendor actions to your brand reputation.

Use this research to identify and quantify the potential operational impacts caused by vendors. Utilize Info-Tech's approach to look at the operational impact from various perspectives to better prepare for issues that may arise.

2. Operational Risk Impact Tool – Use this tool to help identify and quantify the operational impacts of negative vendor actions.

By playing the “what if” game and asking probing questions to draw out – or eliminate - possible negative outcomes, everyone involved adds their insight into parts of the organization to gather a comprehensive picture of potential impacts.

Identify and Manage Operational Risk Impacts on Your Organization

Understand internal and external vendor risks to avoid potential disaster.

Analyst perspective

Organizations need to be aware of the operational damage vendors may cause to plan around those impacts effectively.

Organizations must be mindful that operational risks come from internal and external vendor sources. Missing either component in the overall risk assessment can significantly impact day-to-day business processes that cost revenue, delay projects, and lead to customer dissatisfaction.

Frank Sewell,

Research Director, Vendor Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

More than any other time, our world is changing rapidly. As a result, organizations – and their vendors – need to be able to adapt their plans to accommodate risk on an unprecedented level.

Common Obstacles

Identifying and managing a vendor’s potential operational impact on your organization requires multiple people in the organization across several functions. Those people all need coaching on the potential changes in the market and how these changes may affect operations.

Organizational leadership is often taken unaware during crises, and their plans lack the flexibility to adjust to significant market upheavals.

Info-Tech's Approach

Vendor management practices educate organizations on the different potential risks from vendors in your market and suggest creative and alternative ways to avoid and help manage them.

Prioritize and classify your vendors with quantifiable, standardized rankings.

Prioritize focus on your high-risk vendors.

Standardize your processes for identifying and monitoring vendor risks to manage potential impacts with our Operational Risk Impact Tool.

Info-Tech Insight

Organizations must evolve their risk assessments to be more adaptive to respond to threats in the market. Ongoing monitoring of the vendors tied to company operations, and understanding where those vendors impact your operations, is imperative to avoiding disasters.

Info-Tech’s multi-blueprint series on vendor risk assessment

There are many individual components of vendor risk beyond cybersecurity.

There are many components to vendor risk, including: Financial, Reputational, Operational, Strategic, Security, Regulatory & Compliance.

This series will focus on the individual components of vendor risk and how vendor management practices can facilitate organizations’ understanding of those risks.

Out of Scope:
This series will not tackle risk governance, determining overall risk tolerance and appetite, or quantifying inherent risk.

Operational risk impacts

Potential losses to the organization due to incidents that affect operations.

In this blueprint we’ll explore operational risks, particularly from third-party vendors, and their impacts.
Identify potentially disruptive events to assess the overall impact on organizations and implement adaptive measures to identify, manage, and monitor vendor performance.