Orchestrating efforts to strengthen risk management: Building a resilient organisation
Abstract
This paper provides insight into how a strong collaboration, including rotating personnel, between the first (operations) and second (risk management) lines of defence within large financial institutions improves unity of effort in meeting regulatory requirements, resiliency capabilities, recovery posture and ultimately protecting business operations and customers’ interests. Rather than the teams being inadvertently incentivised to compete, or fostering an adversarial relationship, the experience of walking in each other’s shoes enables the primary goal of the teams to be mutually supportive. This is a force-multiplier in meeting mission objectives and serving customers through continuous alignment and leveraging their common experiences to better identify and rate inherent risks in the environment, the quality of risk management, and gaps that exist between current capabilities and target states. In this approach, the first line receives valuable support from a team dedicated to risk management and with a wealth of operational experience from previous roles. A second line, which has a depth of experience in resiliency operations, can effectively anticipate and address unforeseen challenges, providing critical advisory support based on technical depth and breadth. The second line benefits from an operations team (first line) who better understand risk management beyond their current role within their office of resiliency plans, testing, exercises, training and education or crisis management. Without this added breadth of oversight experience and depth of knowledge in each of the pillars, the first line tends to limit personnel development to a single or limited set of experiences throughout their career. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.
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Author's Biography
Elizabeth Frasure is a Risk and Compliance Advisor Lead at a Fortune 100 financial institution with oversight of the Enterprise Resiliency Group (ERG). Her primary responsibility is to provide risk management and compliance oversight of business continuity (BC), disaster recovery (DR), crisis management, BC/DR exercises, technology and third-party resiliency testing, BC/DR planning and ERG governance. In her previous roles as a consultant and BC programme administrator, Elizabeth has skillfully led teams and advised clients on best practices in the development of resiliency programmes. She has extensive experience in the full BC management cycle to include the creation and implementation of plans, IT DR, crisis communication, crisis management, training, exercises and testing. Elizabeth specialises in risk mitigation, resiliency, crisis management and regulatory compliance. She holds a Master Business Continuity Professional licence through DRI, a BSc in business and psychology and is currently pursuing her MS in enterprise risk management from Boston University.
BSEE, MSE, MBA, CISSP, CRISC, CBCP is the Enterprise Resiliency Group’s Information Technology and Information Security Principal at a Fortune 100 financial institution. He is responsible for implementing repeatable, scalable, sustainable and auditable resiliency operations while mentoring and advising planning, IT resiliency, cyber resiliency and governance directors. He is an accomplished technology, information security and resiliency executive, as well as a retired US Air Force Cyberspace Operations Officer. Adam expertly led large, diverse, geographically separated teams to design, build and defend global enterprises for Fortune 100 companies and the US Department of Defense. He specialises in risk mitigation, resiliency, information security, engineering and regulatory compliance. During his career as a USAF Cyberspace Operations Officer, Adam served as the telecommunications hub and data centre site commander in Okinawa, Japan. In this role he ensured 100 per cent continuity of operations supporting 300,000 personnel during the 2011 9.1-magnitude Japan earthquake, subsequent tsunami and nuclear disaster. He is a Certified Business Continuity Professional, Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control and a Certified Information Systems Security Professional. He holds an MBA, a Master’s in systems engineering and a Bachelor’s in electrical engineering.
Citation
Frasure, Elizabeth and Little, Adam W. (2026, August 6). Orchestrating efforts to strengthen risk management: Building a resilient organisation. In the Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning, Volume 20, Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.69554/RLLL6579.
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