Ok, apologies for sticking to a similar topic as my opening post. However, while spending vacation in Cyprus (very hot by the way!) a couple of events reinforced my desire to share with you the importance of using credited, current tools/information with the right level of granularity.

With regards to recognition, the excellent travel writer Bill Bryson had provided accreditation to our guide book of Cyprus by noting “Rough guides are consistently readable, informed and most crucially reliable."

SAS has recently been accredited through a series of Risk industry awards for its approach to Risk Intelligence and Enterprise Risk Management, winning awards that cover offerings in Risk Management and Compliance.

It was important for me to feel confident about the quality of the travel guide I used in Cyprus (a place where tarmac roads turn to tracks around a bend), in the same way it is vital to Risk Management Professionals to feel confident that the tools they use provide the basis of consistent and mathematically sound methods for analytics, aggregation and provision of reliable information.

Investment in providing up-to-date “capability" requires a widespread delivery of knowledge both in terms of global AND local business and technical details. On our holiday, we found out just how critical this powerful blend of details and delivery can be when a local tourist map turned out to be more reliable than a full-fledged road map supplied through a global company, proving that quality information must also include local knowledge.

Increasingly, customers are just as interested in the mixture of local and global knowledge within a vendor company as the software. SAS has been successful at this type of knowledge delivery for more than 30 years. The appetite to learn, the need for knowledge transfer and access to best practices means that a key differentiator for SAS is the risk experts within its local (SAS has risk experts present in every major financial services centre across the world) and global risk teams.

A final note on Bill Bryson - if you are about to embark on vacation soon, he recommends picking up one or two of the “Rough Guide" series of guide books, and I highly recommend Bill’s latest book The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid, perhaps one of the funniest books I have read for some time. It’s always important to enjoy getting from A to B or just sitting by the pool. Enjoy the summer!