Taking it to the Hill

RIMS Canada Conference co-chairs Kim Hunton and Barbara Carscadden are heavily promoting the benefits of personal and professional ‘connection’ in light of the upcoming 2011 RIMS Canada Conference in Ottawa.

The conference is themed Capital ConneXions – Where Vision and Action Intersect. It is to be held on Sept. 18-21, 2011 at the Ottawa Convention Centre.

Hunton and Carscadden both have strong professional connections with RIMS Canada; each has worked on past conference committees before.

Carscadden recently retired after a 30-year career with  Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Hunton has served for 25 years with the City of Ottawa.

At CMHC, Carscadden started out in clerical functions, but pursued continuing education in the evenings, eventually earning her CIP and CRM designations. Within the first five years or so, she had moved into a risk management role, where she remained for the rest of her career, primarily focusing on the hazard side of the business.

Hunton celebrated her 25th anniversary with her employer in November 2010. She started in 1985 with OC Transpo, Ottawa Carleton’s Regional Transit Commission. In 2001, when the City of Ottawa amalgamated with 11 other cities, the transit authority also got rolled into this new one entity. “At that time, I became the ‘new city’s’ first risk manager,” Hunton says. “Like Barb, we handled insurance, claims, contract review and all the traditional things risk managers do.” Hunton remained in that capacity until 2008, at which time she took charge of leading Ottawa’s enterprise risk management implementation.

Carscadden and Hunton say the role of the traditional risk manager has evolved to encompass a much more holistic view of an organization. “At one time, in the 1980s, if you wanted to call yourself a risk manager, people just assumed you were the insurance buyer because that was the primary thing you did,” Hunton says. “Today, it’s probably about one-tenth of what a risk manager does.”

Carscadden adds risk managers have evolved to become mentors within their organizations. Such personal connections have helped to make others aware of what risk managers do, thus extending the responsibility for risk in a company beyond individuals holding the ‘risk manager’ title. “Now, we’re doing a lot more mentoring of our peers in the company on risk management, and those people we’re mentoring are taking ownership of risk management in the organization,” she says. “Everyone in the organization is involved in the assessment of risk profiles.”

Creating a cultural shift within an organization around the ownership of risk is not a simple task – especially when the organization is large and complex.

The City of Ottawa dubbed its ERM program ‘enhanced risk management,’ Hunton says. It’s tricky to “change the culture” of a municipality because municipal entities are essentially comprised of multiple business units and departments; each has a very different and unique function. For Hunton, the first step was to create a formal enhanced risk management policy to set direction. Next, her team added tools people could use when doing their risk management thinking. “For example, we created a risk impact chart,” she says. “We have tried to articulate in a chart what people in our city think are low-risk items versus high risk.” For example, one item on the chart is business interruption or an inability to deliver services. For bus services, a half-hour service interruption would be considered low-risk. A two-hour service interruption would be cause for concern. A full-day service interruption would be a rather serious risk, especially if it affects all buses. And a prolonged interruption, perhaps due to a labour strike, would be a high-impact risk. “These tools allow people to assess risk in their own context,” Hunton says.

Risk managers can expect to learn about these sorts of techniques, theories and emerging trends at the 2011 RIMS Canada Conference.

The theme ‘Capital ConneXions’ weaves together several threads running through the conference, Carscadden and Hunton say. “Ottawa is the capital of Canada, so ‘capital’ seemed to be a good fit,” Hunton says. “We decided early on we wanted to use that reference because we own it, it’s ours.”

As for ‘ConneXions,’ that’s exactly what the pair hopes will be accomplished at the event. “We’re hoping to build on that theme of ‘Connect with your peers, connect with education and connect with networking,'” Carscadden says.

Hunton adds the conference will allow colleagues from across the country to re-connect with one another. It will also be a place where underwriters might ink some deals. “For whatever reason you’re coming to the conference, it will allow you to connect,” she says.

Details about the conference program are yet to be finalized. But a new addition to this year’s event will be a public sector stream. Rather than offering a specialized panel of speakers from the public sector in a plenary session that everyone attends, the organizing committee is promoting a public sector session as an option during each of the concurrent session time slots. “Ottawa is home to the federal government, so we think that specific stream will be a great attraction for one-day attendees and will really help to pull in the government crowd at all levels, be it federal, provincial or municipal,” Hunton says.

Carscadden notes the facility hosting the event, the Ottawa Convention Centre, will be brand new – quadruple the size of the old Ottawa Congress Centre. Construction is on schedule to be completed by April 2011. The facility is located downtown, right on the old footprint of the Congress Centre, around the corner from Ottawa hot spots like Parliament Hill and the Byward Market. But instead of having only one floor, the Ottawa Convention Centre has four, adding the bonus of convenience for delegates.

“It’s significantly larger than the old space, to the point that we can host all of the functions there,” Carscadden says. “The exhibit hall, the gala, the concurrent and plenary sessions will all be held under one roof. It’s big enough that we don’t have to dismantle the Exhibit Hall in time to set up for the gala on Tuesday night. That should be a real stress reducer.”

Registration for the conference will open in the spring. See www.rimscanadaconference.ca for more information.