Evaluating the enterprise risk management (ERM) processes at Botho College
Abstract
The world over, the issue of handling risk using a holistic instead of a piece-meal approach has become so topical that most business corporations have started to invest a lot of time, money and other resources to ensure that their companies are adequately protected against any lurking enterprise risk. The ability of organisations to react and more importantly to anticipate and proactively plan accordingly against any enterprise risk is seen as the cornerstone of sustainability in higher education. This is especially true for Botho College which depends almost entirely on government sponsored students as their market. Any negative shift in government sponsorship policy can devastate and cause sudden collapse of the college. While literature shows that most higher education institutions spend a lot of their shareholder wealth in meticulously putting up plans to mitigate enterprise risks, further research has also shown that the major problems most of these institutions face is in the implementation as well as the management of the implementation process of enterprise risk management plans. While most higher education institutions can boast of well-crafted and resourced enterprise risk management plans, this research has shown that the problem in these institutions especially at Botho College, is that of failure to properly implement these plans. Evidence from this research shows that Botho College continues to use outdated, centralized and traditional approaches to managing enterprise risk. For institutions like Botho College to successfully manage enterprise risk, they therefore need
to be more open, flexible, creative and willing to radically adjust their enterprise risk management strategies to make them more inclusive and holistic. The main objective of this research therefore was to evaluate the extent to which Botho College is implementing the ERM process against the dictates of authoritative literature.