Risk information – balancing priorities

Reliable generation and timely distribution of relevant information is essential for effective riskmanagement. David Rowe argues that a senior executive with working knowledge of allaspects of the problem and authority to make the necessary compromises among competingpriorities is essential for success

My professional involvement with the use of computers for social scientific and financial analysis began over 30 years ago in the mainframe era. Needless to say, in the intervening years I have witnessed a revolution of breathtaking proportions. A case in point is that the portable notebook PC I use to write this column has 80 times the memory of the dual processor IBM mainframe my colleagues and I used to prepare econometric forecasts in the early 1970s. Despite this explosion in computing