Author: Bernadette Minton

Can New Technologies Undermine Your Company’s Brand? The Employee and Customer Experience

minton bernadette 130x195By Professor Bernadette A. Minton
Academic Director and Interim Executive Director, The Risk Institute
Arthur E. Shepard Endowed Professor in Insurance
Professor of Finance
The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business

It’s almost 2016 (or it is already, depending on when you’re reading this). Everything is digital, and so you took the plunge and developed a mobile app for your customers. The launch of your new mobile app was supposed to streamline and enhance the customer experience, but since it was released it seems as if your customers and your employees rue the day the app appeared. Is it possible that this app has actually been detrimental to your business? Have you found yourself thinking, why haven’t my customers and my employees embraced this new technology?

From Apple to Zillow, digital disruption – the impact of new technologies on the existing consumer brand experience – challenges consumer business. The first thought that comes to mind is that digital disruptions continue to raise consumer expectations about the brand and their online and in-store experiences.

Yet, there is another side. One that is not often considered, but equally important: the digital expectations of the company’s employees. The employees who are charged with innovating the brand and enhancing customers’ brand experiences are also savvy digital users themselves with their own increasingly elevated digital expectations. Senior executives need to consider how digital disruptions also are influencing and modifying their employees’ behaviors and expectations.

At our upcoming Risk Series, Digital Disruption: Brand, Strategy and Technology, taking place on January 21, 2016, our session leaders Deborah Mitchell, Clinical Professor of Marketing, with The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business, and Keith Strier, Principal, with EY Advisory Strategy and Practice and Founder of IDEAS (Innovation, Digital Enterprise & Agile Strategy) collaborate to discuss applications of current research on consumer behavior to digital engagement with customers and employees to understand your organization’s digital vulnerabilities and opportunities.

I invite you to join us and other executives in this interactive session as we engage in conversations about the leading strategies to understand customers’ and employees’ digital experiences as well as discuss the current challenges firms face in today’s digital environment. You will gain insights into how you can develop an enterprisewide digital strategy aligned with your firm’s corporate strategy and brand vision. You will also be in the position of leveraging, and not just mitigating, digital disruptions with your employees and with your customers.

The Risk Institute Executive Education Series will continue on January 21, 2016 with Digital Disruption: Brand, Strategy and Technology, a half-day course for executives. For more information, or to sign up for the session, visit FISHER.OSU.EDU/RISK

The Risk You Can’t Avoid – Weather Disruption

minton bernadette 130x195By Professor Bernadette A. Minton
Academic Director and Interim Executive Director, The Risk Institute
Arthur E. Shepard Endowed Professor in Insurance
Professor of Finance
The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business

Weather plays a big role in our economy – from retail to agriculture to transportation, all industries are affected by it in some way or another.

A summer drought in the Midwest can negatively impact the agriculture sector while simultaneously creating a boom in new housing construction. Consumer behavior is also influenced by the weather. Consumers in Phoenix in light rain and 75° react differently than those in Portland, Oregon in similar conditions.

NOAA_Wavewatch_III_Sample_Forecast

Over the recent years, climate variability has been increasing with extreme weather occurrences becoming more normal. Thus, understanding your organization’s vulnerabilities to weather disruptions is important to achieving corporate objectives and creating value.

In the upcoming Risk Institute Executive Education Risk Series, we will explore the risk management and strategic implications of weather disruptions. Our session leaders from The Bryd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University and from Analytics and Impact Forecasting Services at Aon Benfield (Aon is a founding member of The Risk Institute) will collaborate to provide executives with insights into how:

  • It is less about the averages and evolving weather trends and more about the increasing extremes in our global and regional weather patterns. The use of recent advances in technology, data collection and data quality has led to new predictive analytics tools to more reliably project the weather risks.
  • These new analytical tools can improve managers’ abilities to better understand their business’ exposures to weather and more effectively manage these risks.

No one can control the weather, but planning for weather disruptions and its impact on your business is vital. If you wish to join us for this timely and thought provoking discussion, there are still seats available for the session.

The Risk Institute Executive Education Series will continue on Nov 12, 2015 with Weather Disruption and Risk Management, a half-day course for executives. For more information, or to sign up for the session, visit FISHER.OSU.EDU/RISK

DISRUPTION: Implications for Risk Management

minton bernadette 130x195By Professor Bernadette A. Minton
Academic Director and Interim Executive Director, The Risk Institute
Arthur E. Shepard Endowed Professor in Insurance
Professor of Finance
The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business
 

In just over a week, The Risk Institute at The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business will host its second annual conference on the Columbus campus.

This year’s conference focuses on DISRUPTION – a trendy and perhaps overused word these days in corporate America, but very much relevant and worthy of discussion.

Consider the two sides of DISRUPTION:

You or your organization can cause disruption by creating a new business model for which your competitors’ revenues and cost infrastructures do not allow them to respond quickly.  In this case, the disruption has the potential to create value.

Or, alternatively, you or your organization can be subject to disruption when your business strategy, process or infrastructure, for example, are interrupted by an unexpected event.  In this case, disruption has the potential to negatively impact the firm.

Save the Date 6.8.15During our upcoming conference on Wednesday, October 7 and Thursday, October 8, senior executives will have the opportunity to engage in conversations with experts and peers about leading practices and current challenges related to DISRUPTION.

Highlights include our keynote speakers, Kenny Dichter, founder and CEO of Wheels Up, and retired General Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.  General Hayden, speaking on the opening night, will focus on Managing DISRUPTION.  Mr. Dichter will headline the second day of the conference and present on DISRUPTION as a Catalyst.

Conference attendees also will be challenged during a collection of six 20-minute RISKx talks, modeled after the high-impact and popular TED Talks, to consider DISRUPTION strategically and to generate new insights and influence risk management practice. The RISKx session includes topics such as a firm’s risk appetite, employees’ attitudes toward risk, consumer payment methods and the activist investor.

We will conclude our conference with panel discussions focusing on strategic risk management implications of DISRUPTION in Financial Business Transactions and DISRUPTION in Core Systems.

To learn more, visit The Risk Institute Annual Conference page.

Not If, But When – Facing Cyber Risk in the Digital Age

minton bernadette 130x195By Professor Bernadette A. Minton
Academic Director, The Risk Institute
Arthur E. Shepard Endowed Professor in Insurance
The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business 

 

When the World Wide Web was invented nearly thirty years ago, the concept of what today’s cyber landscape would look like was little more than science fiction. Rapid advances in technology coupled with the growth of the Internet have revolutionized the way businesses and individuals interact. Integrated networks are allowing organizations to access, analyze, use and share information more easily than ever before. The composition of firms in the global economy is changing from organizations producing primarily material goods to those creating intangible assets relying on technology and intellectual property.

Yet, as the global economy becomes increasingly Internet-connected,  organizations, while reaping the potential benefits, are simultaneously exposed Internet_map_1024_-_transparent,_invertedto an increasing array of known and unknown cyber threats. Not a day goes by without the news of another cyber attack taking place at another organization. The conventional wisdom is not “if a cyber breach will happen” but “when will it happen.”

In the upcoming Risk Institute Executive Education Risk Series, we kick off the 2015-16 academic year with a discussion on the evolving environment of cyber threats.  Our session leaders from Battelle, EY and Aon will collaborate to provide executives with insights into how to:

  • Embrace a systematic approach to understanding the evolving cyber landscape and assess the various cyber threats facing the organization
  • Develop an integrated and enterprise-wide approach to consistently assess the organization’s vulnerabilities to cyber threats
  • Proactively quantify their organization’s cyber exposure and apply potential risk management and insurance solutions to help insulate the exposure
  • Apply current findings of research on cyber vulnerability to the products and services

Overall, the half-day session will emphasize the importance of balancing the power of cyber ecosystems with the associated risks to create organizational value.

To learn more or to register, please visit the Risk Series page.