Technology Transformation: Managing Risks in a Changing Landscape

International

Changing tech, changing risks

Whilst technology is pervasive, we only now understand with greater clarity its impact on financial systems, markets and supply chains, allowing organisations to monitor and manage risks.

The push to maintain a competitive advantage, drives increased investment in new technologies. This investment may reduce operational cost and ease the retention of legacy systems, but what challenges arise and how do businesses approach the changing risk profile?

With this in mind we wanted to better understand how well technology risks are appreciated and mitigated, and what plans businesses adopt to manage future technology risk at a time of significant change. In February and March 2022, we surveyed over 500 corporate counsel and risk managers from multiple industries around the world on the risks associated with business critical technologies, including emerging technologies. We will release the detailed findings over 2022 and 2023, starting with this report covering our key findings across all sectors.

What are the key trends?

  • Organisations plan to invest in new technologies in the near future, but recognise this will bring with it additional technology risk – read more in Chapter 2.
  • The risks arising from existing technology appear to be well understood. However, organisations need to do more to embed systems to manage those risks – read more in Chapter 3.
  • Taking both those points into account, organisations will need to invest more time in managing existing technology risk (which shall remain) whilst at the same time, ensure additional effort is put into managing risks arising from new technology.

Organisations that can embrace new technology whilst managing risk will prosper. Those that fail to embrace that technology or fail to invest in better risk management of technology may falter.

The findings set out in this series give a helpful picture for legal and risk management teams to assess their organisation’s approach to technology risks. This will be particularly useful for understanding:

  • Expected sources of future technology disputes (Chapter 2)
  • Levels of industry preparedness (Chapter 3)
  • Current attitudes to the resolution of technology disputes and how dispute resolution and risk management will need to adapt to future uncertainties (Chapter 4).

Click here to access the report.