Framing of and active contribution to the implementation of an erm program in a team and a telecom organization under major transformation

Abstract

Orange Belgium (OBE) is a major player on telecom sector in Belgium. The company is active on the B2C market with both prepaid and postpaid offers, and on the B2B market. During the consultancy project, the company was going through several historical and strategic events. A rebranding, a new CEO appointment and new Executive Committee as well as a historical IT incident were the more important ones. The Audit, Control, Risk (“ACR”) department in which the project was taking place had also been through a thorough reorganization with new team members and Director. In this context, the ACR department was also sponsor of two initiatives: the integrated assurance model (connecting internal audit, control and risk management) and the strengthening of the internal control environment. A substantial part of the project was dedicated to the change management. Positioning ourselves and gaining legitimacy was arduous and time consuming. The disagreements and tensions between the internal control Manager and the Director induced a wrong positioning. We had to correct it. Then, the lack of people management skills from the Manager was also preventing us to find a suitable positioning in the organization. Thanks to the development of a collaborative tool, we were able to gain considerable legitimacy by forcing an expert positioning as none of the actors knew, at that time, how to develop and manage such tool. During the context assessment, we actively participated at two pilot projects that took place respectively in treasury and prepaid business processes. We modeled the processes, assessed the risks and embed the internal control environment responding to the risks identified. From this contextual approach, we brought our perspective to link the different initiatives undertaken by the ACR department: an ERM implementation. Following this, prerequisite conditions were pointed out. It turned out the department may have slightly neglected the upstream critical conditions for such initiative. Among others, a strong business process baseline and culture are the main ones. Besides this, the ACR activities clear lacked of sense for the business. To respond to this, we developed a practical guide gathering fundamental principles such as the business process management, risk management and control. The guide is to be used by the ACR department to communicate. Such communication may have been neglected by the department that from now on the animate the community with trainings and workshops.