Improving Government Decision Making through Enterprise Risk Management

While historically, the federal government has tended to focus risk management in the financial arena, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has recently launched a major reassessment of the government’s approach—encouraging the use of Enterprise Risk Management.

But OMB policies don’t readily translate into action. In this report, Webster and Stanton describe the evolution of federal risk management approaches and several agencies’ experiences in adopting Enterprise Risk Management. The authors asked cur­rent and former federal executives to describe the challenges of adopting an enterprise approach to risk management in their agencies and across the government. The report presents six challenges that they identified and concludes with six steps that organizational leaders can take to make Enterprise Risk Management actionable as a tool for successful implementation of agency programs.