An Alternative pathway for Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) in Higher Education

Call for a New Model
In the conclusion of her groundbreaking 2015 dissertation Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) at US Colleges and Universities: Administration Process Regarding the Adoption, Implementation, and Integration of ERM, Dr. Anne E. Lundquist calls for a new approach, an alternative pathway to facilitate ERM at IHEs.

As ERM matures in higher education, IHE decision-makers are finding ways to adopt the basic tenants of ERM to the higher education culture, with an eye toward embedding risk management with business practices, institutional governance, and strategic planning, and including the explicit discussion of risk in institutional decision-making, in order to achieve institutional objectives and fulfill their missions. IHEs in the U.S. have the opportunity to develop a new model for ERM in higher education, one that isn’t bound up with the bureaucracy of “new managerialism,” but that integrates seamlessly with existing organizational structures and improves strategic decision-making in ways that ultimately lead to effective governance, accomplishing accountability goals with mission at the core.  

The Answer
Emerging technologies now allow Dr. Lundquist’s theoretical perspective to have an immediate and lasting practical application. I believe the new model for ERM in higher education Dr. Lundquist called for lies squarely at the intersection of risk management, visual workflow management and virtual analytics powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. This approach would utilize software that produces clear, concise, visualization of emerging risk events throughout an IHE with reports containing descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics derived from regression based artificial intelligence with the analytics presented both in text and virtual format. The virtual visualization of risk associated analytics will allow decision makers to see patterns in their data leading to a better understanding of the severity of risk exposure and the effectiveness of various response options, not to mention greater ease in identifying emerging patterns in risk groupings. The end game here is more effective ERM resulting in greater institutional stability.