Identify and Manage Strategic Risk Impacts on Your Organization

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

A new global change will impact your organizational strategy at any given time. So, make sure your plans are flexible enough to manage the inevitable consequences.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Identifying and managing a vendor’s potential strategic 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 affect strategic plans.
Organizational leadership is often taken unaware during crises, and their plans lack the flexibility needed to adjust to significant market upheavals.

Impact and Result

Vendor management practices educate organizations on the different potential risks to 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 on your strategic plan with our Strategic Risk Impact Tool.

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

1. Identify and Manage Strategic Risk Impacts to Your Organization Deck – Use the research to better understand the negative impacts of vendor actions on your strategic plans.

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

2. What If Vendor Strategic Impact Tool – Use this tool to help identify and quantify the strategic 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 Strategic Risk Impacts on Your Organization

The world is in a perpetual state of change. Organizations need to build adaptive resiliency into their strategic plans to adjust to ever-changing market dynamics.

Analyst perspective

Organizations need to build flexible resiliency into their strategic plans to be able to adjust to ever-changing market dynamics.

This is a picture of Frank Sewell, Research Director, Vendor Management at Info-Tech Research Group

Like most people, organizations are poor at assessing the likelihood of risk. If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that the probability of a risk occurring is far more flexible in the formula Risk = Likelihood * Impact than we ever thought possible. The impacts of these risks have been catastrophic, and organizations need to be more adaptive in managing them to strengthen their strategic plans.

Frank Sewell,
Research Director, Vendor Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

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

A new global change will impact your organizational strategy at any given time. So, make sure your plans are flexible enough to manage the inevitable consequences.

Common Obstacles

Identifying and managing a vendor’s potential strategic 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 affect strategic plans.

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

Info-Tech’s Approach

Vendor management practices educate organizations on the different potential risks to 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 on your strategic plan with our Strategic Impacts Tool.

Info-Tech Insight

Organizations must evolve their strategic risk assessments to be more adaptive to respond to global changes in the market. Ongoing monitoring of the market and the vendors tied to company strategies is imperative to achieving success.

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

There are many individual components of vendor risk beyond cybersecurity.

This image depicts a cube divided into six different coloured sections. The sections are labeled: 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.

Strategic risk impacts

Potential losses to the organization due to risks to the strategic plan

In this blueprint, we’ll explore strategic risks (risks to the Strategic Plans of the organization) and their impacts.
Identify potentially disruptive events to assess the overall impact on organizations and implement adaptive measures to correct strategic plans.

This image depicts a cube divided into six different coloured sections. The section labeled Strategic is highlighted.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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