FEB 20216Know Your Technology, Know Your Risk Protect Your Foodn the big picture, Enterprise Risk Management must be understood as an all-inclusive risk-based approach embracing the wide range of government, business, and operations that bring value to consumers and stakeholders. In the past, this value has related to single isolated entities, but those days are gone. In part due to technology, today no entity stands alone.President Obama's recent Cybersecurity Executive Order and also his Executive Order mandating open and machine-readable data emphasize how Information Technology (IT) can change the world. IT professionals have learned to welcome new language­like cloud computing, social media, and the "Internet of Things". Expanding IT solutions bring new responsibilities, while the need for risk management applies to technologies and data's uses and/or threats to humans and machines. The "World of Risk" is a big one. The World Economic Forum's (WEF) Risk Response Network divides risk into five categories: Economic, Environmental, Geopolitical, Societal and Technological.WEF identifies this fifth risk­"Technological"­as the most important since failures of critical systems likely can affect the other four. We, in IT, generally agree, but many of us place our own responsibility in mitigating risk first. We often think that IT literally makes the world go around, but too often, IT professionals have worked without understanding or collaborating with others outside their spheres of influence. The hard fact is that if there were no science, no inventions, no business secrets, no military secrets, no research, no need for privacy, there would be no need for cyber security.For those of us in the "World of Food", we often assume that our work concentrates singularly on conflicts of food safety, consumer food needs and wants, the US's increasing responsibility to feed the world, and in the big picture, there will be an additional two billion hungry people to feed on our Joyce HunterIin my viewJOYCE HUNTER, DEPUTY CIO-POLICY & PLANNING AND BARBARA LEACH, SENIOR ADVISOR & DIRECTOR-RISK MITIGATION, USDA
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