Relevant to Executives, Functional Owners, Business Users, and Administrators to illustrate the concept
Illustration overview
The illustration pages in these guides are a case study. They follow one fictional company, Burnham Thorpe Tech, so you can see integrated risk management inside a single organisation. The company, the people, and the struggle on this page are the ground those illustrations stand on. An illustration will pick up a moment in the story.
The company
Burnham Thorpe Tech is a technology company led by Harry Nelson, Chief Executive Officer. The business is divided in a way you will recognise from your own: Marketing, Sales, Operations & Delivery, and Finance, with Product, Technology, and the people function beside them.
Harry holds the company's strategic objectives. Each function is meant to hold the frameworks, policies, controls, risks, and evidence that protect those objectives, and to extend the same checks to the suppliers it relies on.
Who we follow
Harry, Elizabeth, and Emily carry the executive, functional owner, and business user personas. An administrator is the person who configures Zontally IRM for the company.
| Person | Role | Persona |
|---|---|---|
| Harry Nelson | Chief Executive Officer | Executive. Whether risk to the company's strategic objectives is understood and treated |
| Elizabeth Berry | Chief Marketing Officer | Functional Owner. The frameworks, policies, controls, risks, and evidence Marketing owns |
| Emily Johnson | Senior Account Executive, Health | Business User. The assessments and evidence on the work she owns |
The struggle
Burnham Thorpe Tech is trying to see the risk that sits under its strategy. The executive team has objectives. The functions have controls, policies, and evidence. The connection between a risk and the objective it threatens is where the picture is lost.
Some parts of the company can show a framework, a control, and evidence that is current, and can read the same risk as financial, physical, or brand impact. Others have a risk nobody has tied back to an objective, or a supplier outside the checks the function uses for itself. Harry can hear a great deal about activity. He cannot yet look across those lenses and say which objectives are threatened.
That is the struggle the illustrations share. Each page takes one moment in it. The idea itself, and the steps, stay on the other pages in the library. The illustration is the situation that you can take back to your company.