Risk and Security Module added to BC planning software

The UK Defence Academy is a leading centre for both education and research in the rapidly changing defence environment. Based at Cranfield University it has access to all the technical expertise available to both the University and the Royal Military College of Science.

Charged with providing co-ordinated management advice on risk, security and resilience matters to both government and business, one of the Defence Academy’s key objectives was to develop a software methodology for training. It was this that brought Office-Shadow’s award winning Shadow-Planner product to their attention.

“We needed a software platform that was both robust and easy to use, yet flexible enough to allow us to use the modelling and gaming facility for training”, says Ivor Hellberg of the Defence Academy. “Following an extensive evaluation of all the available options, we were particularly impressed by Shadow-Planner’s open architecture. The fact that it is a web based, UK developed product in line with the e-government initiative, was a bonus. Shadow-Planner has gone on to become a key partner in our recent EU appointment to develop a security infrastructure for the whole of Europe operating on the Shadow-Planner platform”.

While Shadow-Planner’s Crisis Management Module was ideal for contingency planning, Cranfield’s Defence Academy saw integrated risk analysis as critical to enable organisations to reduce the probability of an event occurring and to minimise the possible effects of disruptions.

In response, Office-Shadow and the Defence Academy have jointly developed a Risk and Security Module operating on the Shadow-Planner platform. This module allows any organisation to review the risks of possible threats and to evaluate actions to be taken based on recommendations made during the review. Options within these recommendations can be grouped into projects that allow clear comparison of costs versus effect on the risk register.

In practice, risk means different things to different organisations because of variations in their size, purpose and inter-connectedness. This subjectivity can be problematic when a cogent organisation wide resilience strategy is sought. The absence of a common benchmark for risk can skew the subsequent mitigation and response strategy.

“For the first time an organisation will be able to model their exposure along with the impact and associated cost of any risk reduction measures in real time and feed these results directly into their risk mitigation strategy,” says Simon Maddox, Office-Shadow’s technical director.“This will allow senior managers to draw on a dynamic snapshot of their organisations resilience and make risk informed strategic decisions based on clear empirical evidence.”

www.office-shadow.com

•Date: 18th March 2004 •Region: UK •Type: Article •Topic: BC software
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