Understand the risks in information projects

With the popularity of computer viruses and the rampant hackers in recent years, information security risks have been alerted by more and more enterprises, and the importance of information security has also been generally valued. Although some industries have found a set of effective methods to deal with information security risks to a certain extent, there are still some "habitual violations" in the management of information projects. For example, important basic data is stored on the machine of ordinary users, and data backup is not carried out according to the standard data backup strategy, which is easy to cause data loss and data leakage. The loss caused by data leakage changes with the influence of data on enterprise operation, and the size of data loss changes with the integrity of data, the time range of data and the scope of business. According to different losses, different risk coping strategies should be adopted. There are many articles about information security risks and their countermeasures, so I won't say much here. What I want to say here is that in the work of enterprise informatization projects, there are still four kinds of risks that have greater influence than information security risks. We should correctly understand these risks. The risk of informatization project is firstly the policy risk. Policy risk is inevitable for enterprises themselves. The key is that the decision-making department should take relevant factors into account, give guidance and minimize the impact of policy factors.

The risk of informatization project is closely followed by planning risk. Some enterprises did plan the informatization project before building the enterprise informatization project, but due to the difference between the planning level and the development of enterprises, the investment direction in the early stage was wrong, which led to the waste of investment in informatization projects. Some methods can be used to reduce the planning risk, such as the help of third-party consulting companies, which can effectively avoid planning mistakes caused by their own lack of level; Through the construction strategy of "step by step, slightly ahead", the loss of one-time investment can be reduced; By constantly revising the plan, the consistency between the plan and the enterprise development strategy can be improved, thus reducing the impact of differences. In particular, the cost of developing a new system may not be large, but the cost of collecting the original data of the original system may be higher than the development cost of the system itself. In a word, planning risk can be avoided or alleviated by the enterprise's own efforts. The key is that enterprises should recognize the risks in planning.

The third risk of informatization project is technical risk. The technical risk of informatization projects is mainly the risk brought by the rapid development of technology in it industry. The technology of it industry is changing with each passing day. After three to five years, the original advanced equipment may not meet the new application requirements, or even meet the new industry standards. The original manufacturer no longer produces, spare parts are hard to find, and even the original manufacturer no longer exists. The original operating system and application system software have become outdated products, which have lost universality and cannot form seamless links with new technologies. The future development prospects of these technologies are difficult to predict and avoid risks to some extent. No matter which enterprise can fundamentally solve them. The appropriate method is "gradually updating and constantly improving", which can reduce the huge impact and loss caused by sudden changes in the system, especially the loss caused by incompatible system data.

The fourth risk of informatization project is the risk of change. Enterprise's own management reform is also an important risk source of information projects. Due to the frequent changes in the organizational structure of enterprises, the requirements of some application system development projects will change frequently. Although the current management information system emphasizes the need to adapt to the management changes of the enterprise itself, with the change of the organization, the change of responsibilities will lead to the change of the person in charge of the application system development project with a long time span, making the project a "beard project". Many times, we will blame the "beard project" of an it project on the lack of it project management. There are certainly reasons for this, but the management reform of the enterprise itself is also a very important factor. Today is a period of continuous innovation and development of management, and it is understandable for enterprises to adapt to the changing situation. The key is to pay attention to the risk of change and adopt corresponding strategies when implementing the change, so as to avoid the great influence of management change on information project work.