“If you think of the finance department more broadly, besidestheir core fiduciary responsibilities they are very involved inrisk management. I've noted a lot of companies start up enterpriserisk management approaches that reside in the financial areabecause people think of financial risk first before it spreads toother things.

When I was with Amerisure, we built a big analytics space forthe ERM function to be able to help us analyze financial trends andmarket trends. We just started to scratch the surface of predictivemodeling.

More and more I think ERM is going to become a core competencyof financial areas. Organizationally—with the support of IT—theyare going to be looked on as the purveyor of financial risk dataand information and come to the table with it, too.

That implies, in some financial areas, a big skills upgrade. Dothey have the talent there to think bigger picture and engageeffectively with newer technology platforms and have the ability totie this together across the enterprise? Some places have that;others struggle a little bit with it.”

(Frank Petersmark is CIO Advocate for X by 2.)