Intel Analysis: Executive Risk Fusion Center...

How often do you try and prove that a risk hypothesis is true? Is it possible that each piece of evidence that you collect or information you process is utilized to try and prove that your hypothesis is correct.

Analysis of executive Operational Risk Intelligence in your corporation is typically being processed within the organizational silos of your enterprise business units. How it is being shared, how often and then how it is being analyzed, compared and used to confirm or refute multiple hypotheses, can make the difference in your corporate business survival.

The ACH methodology developed by Richards J. Heuer, Jr., is a vital component of Operational Risk Management (ORM).  It can be utilized with your internal Executive "Risk Fusion" Center where the Board of Directors, Senior Management and corporate risk directors determine the correct strategic course for the future:

Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) is a simple model for how to think about a complex problem. It is an analytic process that identifies a complete set of alternative hypotheses, systematically evaluates data that is consistent and inconsistent with each hypothesis, and rejects hypotheses that contain too much inconsistent data. ACH takes you through a process for making well-reasoned, analytical judgments. It is particularly useful for issues that require a careful weighing of alternative explanations of what has happened or is happening. ACH can also be used to provide early warning or help you evaluate alternative scenarios of what might happen in the future. ACH helps you overcome, or at least minimize, some of the cognitive limitations that make prescient intelligence analysis so difficult; it helps clarify why analysts are talking past one another and do not understand each other’s interpretation of the data. ACH is grounded in basic insights from cognitive psychology, decision analysis, and the scientific method.

What is the likelihood that the General Manager, Global Security of your enterprise is looking at surveillance information on a rogue employee today to assess workplace threat and to help keep the company safe? Simultaneously, the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is analyzing the latest log data from various intrusion systems to determine if the "Advanced Persistent Threat" (APT) has changed it's cyber tactics to steal the latest software R & D architecture from the office suite business unit. The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Head of Internal Audit are analyzing the latest revenue reports with the Vice-President of Sales & Marketing to determine why the Asia Pacific team have been losing 8 out of 10 business deals in the forecast pipeline.

The likelihood is high. Each is formulating a hypothesis independently of each other and in most cases they will never know that there is a risk related nexus to the entire enterprise. The reason is that your Executive "Risk Fusion" Center does not exist or is unable to analyze competing questions that are being asked about potential areas of concern. So when do you use this approach and the ACH methodology?

Use ACH when the judgment or decision is so important that you can't afford to be wrong. Use it to record and organize relevant evidence prior to making an analytical judgment or decision. Use it to identify and then question assumptions that may be driving your thinking, perhaps without realizing it. Use it when the evidence you are working with may be influenced by denial and deception. Use it when gut feelings are not good enough, and you need a more systematic approach that raises questions you had not thought of. Use it to prevent being surprised by an unforeseen outcome. Use it when an issue is particularly controversial and you want to highlight the precise sources of disagreement. Use it to maintain a record of how and why you reached your conclusion.

The human mind needs modern software analytics, proven cognitive tools and vetted processes of thinking to arrive at the answer. While the answer may not be what you seek, it is the answer to the question, without a doubt. Live with it or discard it. This does not matter. What does matter is that the Executive "Risk Fusion" Center brought together the best of all these operational risk components and whether the human chooses to accept it or ignore it could be our corporate prosperity or peril. What do you think AI?

Remembering 9/11: 2026-Teaching the Children...

Where were you on the morning of September 11th, 2001? Everyone seems to remember...

On a cool sky blue morning, 25 years ago in Northern Virginia, we are sitting in a Reston Town Center Hyatt hotel restaurant having breakfast around 8:00AM with a business colleague. A little over 40 minutes into our discussion, we heard some people talking quite loud in the bar next to us as they were then watching CNN to see the World Trade Center Twin Towers attack. As cell phones rang around us, they were all loved ones checking in and urging us to hurry home.

Walking to the parking lot, the proximity of our kids elementary school and middle school to the CIA campus created a feeling of great internal anxiety and it soon turned to fear.

Unknown to us at that moment, five terrorists were also onboard American Airlines Flight 77 that had already departed from Dulles (IAD) at 8:20AM headed to Los Angeles (LAX).

Little did we know that the AAL77 hijackers onboard that Boeing 757 flight had slept the night before a half mile from us in a Herndon, VA motel.  30 or so minutes into the flight over Ohio, with the terrorists now in control and the aircraft transponder off, it would make its turn back to Washington, DC to attack the West side of the Pentagon at 9:37AM.

We could now see the smoke rising in the distance on the Eastern horizon.

What this September 11th day is about every year beyond these memories, is the renewed vow of vigilance. A time to revisit all the reasons why you have made the decisions you have since that Tuesday morning twenty-five years ago. Never Forget that day. Never Forget why you wake each morning.

9/11 vigilance is about being adaptive. It is about resilience.

For those of us who have never paid the same price as those who have served, supported and are the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters or relatives of those who have, we can never know or really feel what they have. We can only pledge our vigilance in continuing our respective missions.

Most of all. The mission is not America's alone and the entire planet understands this. As they teach the history of 9/11 in the schools of New York City, Haiti, Chile, Pakistan, India and even Saudi Arabia, what do you think the lesson is about?

If it is not about vigilance and resilience, then we are doing our children a disservice. We must be preparing them for the future threats that this globe will be facing in the years and decades before us.

Whether it is the wrath of "Mother Nature" or the evil planning of AI or ordinary people does not matter. We can never predict exactly the day the hour or when and where the next attack will occur. Whether it will impact our buildings, bridges, rivers, schools or the Internet is unknown.

If all of us on this 3rd rock from the sun, have done our job teaching our kids about “Vigilance and “Resilience”, then we should all be able to have a peaceful nights sleep. Devoid of nightmares.

Remember that Tuesday in September across the globe, for the lessons we have all learned since that infamous day in New York City, Washington, DC and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

For the children, teach them the truth…

PII: Achieving a Defensible Standard of Care...

A data security breach of "Personal Identifiable Information" (PII) will impact your organization in the future. This incident is no different than other Operational Risk loss events to your global enterprise this year, such as occupational fraud or the settlement of a lawsuit.

Correct?

This time however, the difference is that now your own employees or your customers are the victim. Their PII has been lost or stolen and your organization has been the safeguarding entity of that valuable data until now. Your response is vital and the way you legally and ethically behave is a significant risk factor in itself.

Your brand reputation in the marketplace is on the line and the potential churn in lost customers or employees is at stake. Like many post 9/11 companies, your crisis response protocol is already in place for incidents that require your senior executives and the establishment of an immediate Incident Response Team (IRT).

So why is lost or stolen PII such an important executive issue for any organization?

In privacy, PII is less restrictive than in Information security and one definition can be found in the EU directive 95/46/EC:^[1]

"Article 2a: 'personal data' shall mean any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity;"

Although the concept of PII is ancient, it has become much more important as information technology and the AI-powered Internet have made it easier to collect PII, leading to a profitable market in collecting and reselling PII.

PII can also be exploited by criminals to stalk or steal the identity of a person, or to plan a person's murder or robbery, among other crimes. As a response to these threats, many web site privacy policies specifically address the collection of PII, and lawmakers have enacted for decades a series of legislation to limit the distribution and accessibility of PII.

As your General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer begin to assess the magnitude and breadth of your recent PII exposure, so too does the plaintiff lawyers. Now the clock starts ticking and each tick gets louder and louder, as different litigation strategies are discussed. In Board Rooms and judges court chambers across the United States, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and the admissibility of "Electronically Stored Information" (ESI) is being discussed as a legitimate component of evidence and it's relevance in the case.

What if you could now "Rewind" this scenario and find yourself in a "legal safe zone" to adequately prepare, prevent and even preempt a "Data Security Breach" in your organization. This "legal safe zone" is available today and is as close as your corporate executive conference room, with several "Subject Matter Experts" working side-by-side. It's a professional service solution from a data breach services leader.

The "Achieving a Defensible Standard of Care" Readiness workshop in your organization begins with a two day facilitated process for discovery and convergence with your fellow company executives.

You will be engaged in a proactive, preventive and preemptive tactical plan in preparation for the day of your next PII-involved Data Security Breach. Upon completion, this operational plan establishes the baseline framework for a complete team-based drill.

This outcome will then test the readiness of your key stakeholders internally and external to the company. More importantly, it provides the strategic insight on what vulnerabilities still exist in your particular organizations approach to remediation and legal compliance.

Each year, despite security efforts, millions of personal records are compromised as a result of corporate and public-sector data breaches. Breach response costs - mandated notification, PR, call handling, credit monitoring and legal fees - can add up, yet traditional approaches don't fully mitigate the risk to your business or your customers.

A data security breach of "Personal Identifiable Information" (PII) will impact your organization in the future. The next one will be different…