Using the Internet to do business introduces a new set of risks in addition to the ones every organisation faces. Risks associated with the Internet are wide-ranging and vary in their complexity and the ease with which they can be avoided, minimised or eliminated.
Risk management is the art of identifying risks, prioritising them and then minimising their occurrence and impact on your e-business.
Risks associated with e-business that might lead to lost opportunities and frustrated customers cover areas such as:
- business - eg if you sell products directly to customers on your website, how this will affect your relationship with your re-sellers
- financial - eg the database used to support your e-business costs too much to maintain
- personnel issues - eg what happens if the only person in the business who really understands your website resigns
- technical - eg the website is inaccessible for a few days or is too slow, leading to lost opportunities and frustrated customers
- legal - eg your use of a list of email addresses breaks privacy laws.
What to do
Managing risk requires a systematic approach. Here is a suggested approach that could be easily implemented in any organisation:
- consider each of the risk areas above and identify the risks under each for your e-business
- prioritise them
- develop strategies to minimise or overcome them
- implement the strategies
- evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies
- go back to step 1 and monitor for new risks.
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