| Using Alerts to Better Manage a Small Company’s Risk Richard Torian December 3, 2010 I. Introduction. Using an alert application, such as Google Alerts, offers the possibility of receiving on a daily basis, by email, messages that can help the small business become aware of, understand, and then better manage risks to the small company. The purpose of this article is to describe how alerts, created by using Google Alerts, might be used in risk management. These alerts will send, daily by email, information appearing in news, blog, social media, video, and other databases that Google searches based on selected keyword search terms. Each of my alerts was created to focus on only one risk. I have an alert for each of these risks: Accounting Banking Cash Finance Insurance Inventory Legal Management Manufacturing Marketing Personnel Products Sales Strategic This list of risks I believe are generally accepted as some of the risks that are important to small businesses. Not all risks on this list may pertain to every company. Other risks could be added and alerts created as needed. Combining these risk terms with other terms in the key word search strategy then hopefully will find information that continually appears across the Internet dealing with these risks. The success of the alert system depends on just what information does appear that is relevant to the small business and the success of the alert application to find the information. II. Using Google Alerts. Creating a Google Alert is a very simple process. A Google account is required. At the Google Alerts home page (http://www.google.com/alerts), sign into your account to create and manage your risk alerts. Signing in will take you to a page where a new alert can be created by clicking “New Alert”. Fill in your key words, the frequency you want the alert to update (e.g. once a day, once a week), and whether you want the result to be emailed to you or to be created as a RSS feed which you can then add to a RSS feed reader. III. Demonstration. In this section I provide, in feed format, the output of each of my alerts. IV. Conclusions. Using an alert application in the way described above seems to me to create the possibility of gaining a very valuable result for a small company – the reduction, and perhaps elimination, of risks to the company. And, this possibility is created and implemented very efficiently, requiring little time, taking advantage of the power of the Internet. There is no guarantee that a company’s risks will be identified and prevented using an alert system, but it seems that such an alert system might decrease the likelihood of risk threats materializing into events which hurt the company. Please click here to return to the Management Accounting Information Center front page Please click here to send an email with comments on this article. |