URM Forum Launches to Solve Risk Management Problems of Fourth Industrial Revolution

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The URM Forum, which will serve a global community of experts and practitioners who are committed to developing a more scientific, cross domain approach to identifying and managing operational risks that increasingly threaten business performance due to the dynamic complexity of our modern world, launched today.

Current operational risk management practices are placing businesses in jeopardy. As our world becomes more dynamically complex, the opportunity to take corrective actions is shrinking, while risks are rising. Traditional risk management practices and technologies can no longer provide leaders with the insights they need to navigate the uncertainty and exponential change being driven by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

“CEOs and governmental leaders are facing a real dilemma today as risks are growing exponentially while most risk management methods provide no better insights than astrology,” said Charlie Fote, former CEO, First Data. “URM Forum provides the framework we need to work together in order to identify a more effective approach to risk management.”

URM Forum will support a collaborative global network of individual thought leaders who are committed to working across industry and government segments to identify new operational risk management solutions that are vendor neutral and non-competitive in nature. Founding members include executive and technology leaders from Accretive, IBM, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, La Poste, Morgan Stanley, CLS Services and federal government.

“There can be no doubt that large and global businesses are in for some rough roads ahead if we cannot tame the complexity of risk challenges they now face,” said Nabil Abu el Ata, CEO, Accretive and Founder of URM GROUP. “By interacting and collaborating on a broad framework of shared objectives, URM Forum members will strive to deliver the best practices and technology frameworks that allow business and government stakeholders to make smarter decisions in times of uncertainty, maximize future opportunities and mitigate dynamic complexity related risks associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

URM Forum members must be invited and qualify based on their ability to contribute towards a meaningful solution, which is part of what makes this forum unique and our work impactful. Executive, technology, academia and governmental leaders interested in joining URM Forum are encouraged to apply at https://urmgrp.com/urm-forum/join-urm-forum/.

 

 

X-ACT supports IBM Cloud Innovation

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In his latest blog post, The Right Way to Ensure Operational Stability while moving to the Cloud, Thomas Rose, IBM Cloud Innovation Advisory Leader Germany, Austria and Switzerland, explained how IBM is using X-ACT® to optimize and improve the operational stability of their cloud services.

X-ACT is the innovation behind IBM’s Cloud Load Simulation solution. The emulation and analytics capabilities of X-ACT allows IBM to identify when and if dynamic complexity will lead to system limits within cloud environments, diagnose the root cause of the limit and determine the best remedial actions by weighing the benefits, complexity and cost of proposed solutions.

Many cloud initiatives fail to meet client expectations due to inadequate risk identification and mitigation early in the outsourcing project’s lifecycle. Due to the complexity of modern business, it is no longer possible to intuitively assess both the benefits and risks posed by moving services to the cloud.

Now with X-ACT, users can quickly model existing systems and evaluate how proposed changes will impact the cost efficiency, scalability and performance of business operations. By effectively identifying any potential risks that could impact the quality of service and verifying that all applications will behave correctly under any operational condition, decisions can be made with confidence in the outcome.

This is a win-win for cloud vendors and their clients, as it provides an insurance mechanism to verify that the cloud envrionment will continuously meet the promises made during the early stages of project definition.

Next we will be working to combine IBM Watson and X-ACT technology to implement cloud production control environments, which dynamically react to market events, and control system loads and resources to operate at an optimum cost level.

Using X-ACT Metrics to Guide Decisions

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Learn how to make operational risk decisions with confidence

The X-ACT: Using Metrics to Guide Decisions | How to Guide shows how companies use the advanced analytics and emulation capabilities supported by X-ACT to identify how dynamic complexity leads to system limits, diagnose the root cause of limits and determine the best remedial actions by weighing the benefits, complexity and cost of proposed solutions.

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The analytics and emulation capabilities supported by X-ACT® arm business and technology leaders worldwide with the foresights they need to confidently respond to changing system dynamics and clearly understand which (and when) preventive and opportunistic actions should be taken to ensure the continuous efficiency and cost effectiveness of operations.

Using accurate, representative and reproducible models of business processes, applications and infrastructure, X-ACT delivers an end-to-end emulation of a service that accurately represents the behavior of system dynamics. The emulation replaces structures, characteristics and behaviors by perturbations exerted on dynamic equations through multiple order perturbations on dynamic coordinates such as volume, service quality and cost. This is very complex math, but it is handled entirely by X-ACT.

Once a system is transformed into an emulation, it allows users to quickly test and economically explore an unlimited number of scenarios that would otherwise be complex, expensive or even impossible to test on a real system. In comparison to other practices, such as simulation, emulation is superior in its ability to accurately replicate a system, but its biggest advantage is that it allows for the discovery of previously unknown patterns, which cannot be determined using any other method.

Now users can emulate risk because X-ACT can mathematically reproduce unknowns that may happen under certain conditions. Once the emulation process is complete, X-ACT users can change variables—such as volume, architecture and infrastructure or perform sensitivity predictions on changing process dynamics—to observe the outcomes (even when we have no historical record of these events ever happening).

Discovering the cause and effects of dynamic complexity is foundational to our universal risk management approach. Since conventional methods ignore the unknowns, risk often appears as a surprise that may potentially impact operational performance. To predict risk and anticipate the appropriate course of treatment, we must discover these unknowns and determine their current and future influence on system behavior.

The X-ACT: Using Metrics to Guide Decisions | How to Guide shows how companies use the advanced analytics and emulation capabilities supported by X-ACT to identify risk and take remedial actions by weighing the benefits, complexity and cost of available solutions.