Turning Hope to Action with Travel Risk Technology

Turning Hope to Action with Travel Risk Technology

Deploying, implementing and testing travel policy using suitable technology solutions, is critical to run effective travel risk management. Rather than discuss the crafting of actual policy … let's discuss some of the major questions we should be asking to where technology can be used to safeguard your travellers. Investing time and effort into travel risk solutions, organisations can translate threats, mitigations, insights and response into a tangible and progressive roadmap for protecting your workforce. Your awareness of available technologies will directly shape the value of your travel risk management strategy. Overcoming any tactical and strategic anxiety about rolling out such a solution is an essential first step. Not being willing to make change means nothing will change.

What is your organisation's risk profile?

To effectively safeguard your organisation, it is crucial to identify potential threats and understand the significance of location for various aspects such as home, office, travel, assets, facilities, suppliers, and other elements of your business. Identifying threats does not have to start from scratch, either through your own experience or from external sources you should be able to prepare and implement much of what may impact your business. This has traditionally been managed as part of a risk register, whether that be in print form or as a knowledge base. Times have changed though, what was an end point of analysis and mitigation strategies now needs to be a living and evolving part of your technology solution. Any foreseen threats need to be mitigated, unforeseen threats should be fed back into assessment. It is also critical to analyse how you measure the effectiveness of the technical implementation to ensure policy is covered. You should also recognize where there are limitations of these measures within your technology solutions.

 Considerations

• Ways you can identify threats and articulate them into technology

• Solutions that take threats and mitigations and integrate them into a technology solution

• Understand impact of these through testing

Why did your technology not work in a situation?

The assumption that your existing technology will flawlessly handle every situation may be a major risk to your success. It's essential to frequently evaluate both the technology and its configuration to identify areas for enhancement and resolution. Continuous review and improvement are key to ensuring optimal performance and effectiveness. Consider whether your technology adequately supported your travel policy and if it could scale to manage major crises. Reflect on any technical issues or awkward design features you had to work around. Capture and feedback situations where strategies and responses were insufficient or inapplicable because you solution did not meet expectations. Evaluate why communications may have failed to deliver and why certain individuals did not appear as impacted or located on a map. Assess the accuracy of the risk intelligence that triggered the situation and whether it provided the necessary situational intelligence at the time. Determine if automated workflows completed, failed or stalled, and define what success or failure looked like.

Considerations

• Value risk solutions that provide insight into data validation issues and message delivery

• Feed any issues found back into a task or project to be resolved

• Review how you are testing for this, can you improve the testing to find the same issues again?

Can you fix the problems?

In the day to day usage of travel risk solutions, you may encounter issues with technology itself or its configuration through testing, or worse within a crisis. It is crucial for your procedures to address situations where technology is unavailable, insufficient, or unsuitable. Look to your travel risk solution to provide tools and analysis to identify and resolve these issues, including checking the validity and completeness of profile details, communication delivery, and travel itinerary data. Some fixes may start with your data. Engaging with your whole organization to improve overall data quality, accurate profiles, and tested contact numbers is essential. Additionally, finding ways to improve travel location accuracy, either within the booking solution or upon itineraries transferring into your travel risk solution is important. It is vital to understand that different emergency messaging channels are not guaranteed for delivery success; they are not silver bullets, and you need strategies in place to use the most appropriate channels in specific situations and monitor for delivery success.

Considerations

• Work with key stakeholders to improve overall engagement in improving the profile data quality and the adoption of relevant apps and tools to do so

• Look at how you work with vendor support teams, develop your own technical fixes or work with integration partners to improve any data quality issues

• Understand for given scenarios the most reliable, engaging and effective communication channels, do not rely on a single channel during an incident or crisis

How are you tracking the change to your risk profile?

Making frequent updates and improvements to the risk profile of your organisation means you are fitter and more agile to change and crises when they arise. You should build a strategic roadmap and plans to address new solutions and upgrades required to your technology solutions. Change is inevitable … so it is vital to improve understanding of threats, vulnerabilities and impact to your business and ensure your technology deployed is ready and tested. These technologies should also provide you with tools to identify, follow and analyse areas impacting your people and business. Along with the occurrence of unforeseen events, it is also crucial to identify where threats, assessments and mitigations are weak and put plans in place to resolve. Regular review is important, monitoring the changes identified or put in place since the last risk review will allow you to gauge progress and report status to your leadership team. Additionally, the recommended roadmap may need to include new regulations and compliance required of your organisation. Evaluating the effectiveness of risk technologies, along with the status of configuration, deployment, and utilization, is crucial for a successful roadmap. By addressing process issues and refining response procedures, you can ensure preparedness for future challenges.

Considerations

• Find solutions that highlight changes and trends in threats and impact on your organisation

• Create a strategic roadmap and plan for new tasks and improvements

• Review how new and unforeseen threats are being identified and fed back into the roadmap

Are you testing everything?

To ensure the effectiveness of your risk mitigations, it is crucial to test them using realistic scenarios, exercises, personnel, and as real as possible test data. Some solutions may provide additional tools, logins or digital twin environments for you to do this in. Implementations of policy should be both testable and measurable. Consider whether you have addressed all potential threats and mitigations, any gaps should be added back into your roadmap and plans. When conducting exercises or simulations, evaluate the current measures in place and improve where necessary. Engage with the workforce to perform realistic test scenarios using the same tools they would use in reality. Confirm the successful rollout of new mobile apps, verify message delivery, and ensure that recipients have received and read any risk-related content sent to them.

 Considerations

• Build a digital twin in your technology to run tests and simulations using anonymised data using the same technology you will use in reality

• Include real people both in the situation and response teams to ensure you take human factors into account

• Ensure you measure success in a way that can be compared to spot gaps, improvements or issues

In Summary

It is not always easy to simply take a complex set of threats and mitigations and transfer them directly into a single technology solution. However, you should carefully select solutions that are flexible and adaptable before and during use where they can test, measure and feedback improvements. As with any enterprise solution, maintain a roadmap or plan of new requirements and improvements for your technology. To ensure your travel risk solutions are effective, avoid leaving threats and mitigation strategies in a static knowledge base or unimplemented report. Take the testing and measurement seriously, monitor that feedback and improvements make it onto your roadmap and plans. If your current technology does not cover most of the aspects discussed here, look to solutions that can seamlessly integrate data and workflows. Review your travel risk technology often, ensure it is fit for purpose, covering all the threats and mitigations you have identified, and the vendor supporting it is always improving it, fixing any issues quickly and innovating.