Riskonnect conducts an annual educational conference each fall to provide clients and prospects with opportunities to learn, network with peers and explore new ways to use their solutions. It’s more than just a conference, though. It’s an exchange of ideas.

The user conference is an excellent opportunity to hear from active practitioners in all areas of risk management about the challenges they are facing. Here are just a few of the topics conference goers said are plaguing their minds day in and day out.

Cybersecurity

Data breaches have consistently been ranked a top concern for businesses, and those concerns were alive and well among conference goers worried about how to effectively prevent and insure cyber risks.

The right risk management technology can actually help with several pieces of the cyber security puzzle—particularly lessening the burden on your IT department and improving your disaster response process.

For instance, truly integrated risk management technology can replace innumerable applications (from enterprise risk management and Sarbanes-Oxley solutions to claims management and health and safety management solutions, and more). With fewer applications or systems to manage, and less burden on your internal server, your IT department might actually have more time to focus on broader and more impactful cybersecurity efforts.

When it comes to disaster recovery efforts following a data breach, the right risk management technology can automate the entire disaster recovery process—alerting stakeholders of the event and the next steps accountable individuals need to take.

Seamless disaster recovery processes can translate into effectively managing your organization’s reputation, as well as meeting any compliance requirements regarding responses to such events, which are increasingly being put in place on a global level.

As with any technology you deploy at your company—regardless of whether it’s actually used for the purpose of combating cyber security—you need to ensure it is secure and that the vendor has best in class cyber security procedures in place.

Read, “Combat Cyber Risks: Ask Your Tech Vendors These Four Questions.”

Predictive Analytics

Company leadership has long wanted a crystal ball to predict business trends, and thanks to the evolution of predictive analytics, determining the future seems that much more possible.

Conference goers acknowledged the emphasis being put on predictive analytics from leadership across their organizations. They said the need to spot trends and make revenue-impacting decisions with clarity and speed is critical—even when it comes to claims.

That being said, claims and risk managers need the appropriate predictive analytics tools to be able to execute. This means they need comprehensive, up-to-the minute data, as well as data visualization tools that can quickly and easily summarize the data so it’s easy to understand—items that spreadsheets can’t really provide.

The right risk management technology, on the other hand, can help. Whereas silo inducing spreadsheets offer a rear-view perspective and “speak the language” of only one department or one type of data set in each document, the right risk management technology will serve as a single central repository for disparate data that is automatically standardized into information everyone can understand.

Further, because such technology operates in the cloud, data is automatically collected and updated in real time via data import and other input tools. It surfaces relevant risk information from wherever it’s hiding in your organization; connects it with other internal and external data; and then normalizes it with data processing tools to ensure consistency among the data being compared—all without requesting data from IT or vendors that will likely be out of date once the request is fulfilled.

The right risk management technology will also make your risk data dynamic and visual—updated and depicted graphically or pictorially in real time. Gone are the days of promising the board you’ll get back to them or spending hours transforming data into visuals—like infographics, dials and gauges, geographic maps, sparklines, heat maps and detailed pie, bar and fever charts—that leadership will understand.

This means you can field critical business questions from leadership on the fly. The earlier an organization can determine the need to closely monitor a claim, the greater chance of taking the right steps to minimize the impact and cost. Without reliable predictive analytics, an organization loses valuable insight vital to efficiently managing potentially high-cost claims.

Electronic OSHA Reporting

Conference-goers’ analysis around whether OSHA will really ever mandate employers to submit electronic reports of injury and illness data persists—even with a fast approaching December 1 deadline for some employers. But, we’ve all seen such deadlines pushed back before.

With only a recent nomination to fill OSHA’s top leadership position—after months of little-to-no leadership at all—as well as an OSHA data breach earlier in the year, it’s anyone’s guess as to what requirements will truly come to fruition and when.

The good news is that solutions do already exist for seamlessly submitting your electronic reports of injury and illness to OSHA—required or not. First of all, the right risk management technology will eliminate disparate systems that require independent data entry, effectively reducing duplicate and incomplete data.

Read, “Riskonnect Helps Companies Meet New OSHA Regulations.”

It will also simplify the incident report process by providing guided assistance for employees to classify work-related injuries or illnesses. This allows employers to produce a comprehensive csv file of data that meets OSHA’s electronic reporting standards, including the ability to accurately report on Days Away, Restrictions and Transfers (DART), and Days Away from Work (DAW) incidence rates.

Even more, the right risk management technology will go beyond meeting OSHA standards, and has the ability to monitor incident report trends—allowing compliance officers to accurately analyze and develop appropriate remediation strategies to reduce future incidents.

Regardless of if and when the OSHA injury and illness electronic reporting requirements become mandatory, using technology to make the submission process more seamless can be a game changer: Using fewer resources for a traditionally error-laden administrative process and redeploying them to actually preventing injuries is more than cutting costs. It’s adding value.

 

Takeaways for Riskonnect

It’s clear our clients and users know their “stuff.” Whether they are risk, claims or safety managers, or heed from departments like legal and compliance, we are continually blown away by our clients’ extensive experience and track records reducing the total cost of risk for their organizations. Their heightened intelligence not only makes them great at their jobs, but also helps us to be better at our jobs because of their willingness to collaborate.

Our clients’ expertise wouldn’t be of much value to us if they weren’t willing to share it. They are committed to helping us to expand our own risk management knowledge in order to further complement our technology expertise. At the same time, our clients are also eager to learn from us and amenable to trying new approaches to how they work, based on our insights and technology advancements. This level of collaboration is what makes us a powerful team.

Powerful teams, of course, spur innovation. Our clients’ risk management expertise and willingness to collaborate have allowed Riskonnect to innovate our solutions in a way that benefits them. At the same time, our expertise and willingness to collaborate have allowed our clients to be more innovative in their jobs and with their risk management programs. This translates into success for all stakeholders, and really is what drives our team members to keep coming back to work every day.

Here at Riskonnect, we truly are humbled to work with the best and brightest practitioners across all areas of risk management. While the annual user conference is a yearly reminder of why we are so lucky, we are also reminded on a daily basis during our interactions with smart, engaged and forward-thinking customers—and for that, we’re especially thankful.

In Conclusion

Just like our clients and prospects look to the user conference each year to learn how to better use their technology, we look to the user conference to get a pulse on the industry and ensure we are developing solutions that will solve their problems, including those related to cybersecurity, predictive analytics and OSHA reporting.

Check out our white paper on Analyzing the Unintended Consequences of Updates to the OSHA Post-Accident Drug Testing Rule.

Schedule a demo to find out how Riskonnect can solve your challenges.