I went to last week’s SAP sponsored GRC conference with high expectations. For some months now I’ve been eagerly following the work being done inside SAP on this topic, watching blogs like Greenmonk and James Farrar’s On Sustainability and building up my own understanding of the issues, some of which are much more complex than they first appear. Imagine then my dismay when two of what I thought were the more important sessions: Go Green: Managing Environmental Compliance While Building Brand Value and the other, a more general canter through issues around corruption that included the introduction of a survey on confronting corruption by PWC, were poorly attended. In the first session I counted around 30 people, in the second, fewer than 20. That for a conference that must have attracted some 5,000 delegates.

I realise we’re very early in understanding of how different aspects of sustainability and accountability impact business performance but in both cases, speakers made solid cases for business value derived from doing the right things. One of the problems as I see it is the way it is positioned by the analyst community.

I sat in on an analyst lunch where a Gartner representative posited that GRC falls into siloes - some around IT, others around finance and operations. I was horrified. To me this is a perpetuation of ‘old’ thinking. It simply doesn’t make sense to fence off risk in this manner. If anything, I regard it as counter productive. Here’s why.

Business may be organised along siloes but risk cuts right across and through the business. Take what happened at Siemens as an example. Earlier today it announced massive potential losses. Some came about because of turnkey projects gone sour but according to the FT:

The second problem came in the mobility unit, where delays in awarding big projects such as the Transrapid train and restructuring in one of its businesses led to about