by Brianna Crandall — August 18, 2014—Global facility services provider ISS has released a whitepaper discussing insights on how to manage and mitigate risk through strategic facilities management.
The research behind the whitepaper, Managing and Mitigating risk within Strategic Facility Management, is based on fieldwork performed by the Vienna University of Technology, Department of Information and Facility Management (IFM); PriceWaterhouseCoopers Austria (PwC); and experiences derived from the delivery side of the service provider ISS Austria’s FM business.
The significance of risk management and control activities has increased as a result of various legal initiatives in the United States and Europe, but also as a result of the current economic situation, notes ISS. In this context, a methodology is presented that provides measures to implement or optimize a company’s risk management system as well as its internal control system (ICS).
In addition, this paper demonstrates how facility services outsourcing can be implemented in an optimum way in order to manage, and ultimately minimize, risk. In doing so, risk maps and reference processes, in addition to reference risk and control matrices deriving from companies and institutions, can be used as points of reference for developing organizations’ own risk management systems and ICS, as well as for designing their operational and organizational structures.
Naturally, when applying these measures within a specific organizational unit it is necessary to individually tailor the reference models, reminds ISS. This also includes defining roles and responsibilities within business processes, optimizing the outsourcing activities of facility services, and taking aspects of risk management into consideration.
