Debra Elkins Named ERM Industry Fellow by NC State College of Management

GM engineer is sharing her passion about enterprise risk management with NC State

May 22, 2006 - Debra Elkins, Ph.D., technical lead researcher for enterprise risk modeling at General Motors R&D Center in Warren, MI, is passionate about enterprise risk management (ERM).

The director of the Enterprise Risk Management Initiative at North Carolina State University’s College of Management found her to be a great fit with his goals for the initiative, and named Elkins the college's first ERM Industry Fellow this year.

Elkins said that she sees the need for ERM not only for industrial engineers and operations researchers - her fields of study - but also in broader aspects affecting the enterprise - economics, public policy, and the various critical infrastructures that keep the global economy rolling from day to day.

As the first college’s first ERM Industry Fellow, Elkins is helping to spread the word for the growing needs for students, faculty, and business professionals to focus on better techniques for managing the complexities of risks threatening today’s enterprise. Her objective is to help assure that the next generation of employees will have the cross-disciplinary skills that GM and other companies need to manage risks across the enterprise in a technology rich, global economy.

She offers a simple analogy to everyday life: “When you teach a child to ride a bike, you teach them to wear a helmet, ride with the flow of traffic, and to use hand signals to communicate to other drivers or bicycle riders. You also buy medical insurance, because accidents do happen. These modest preparations can help prevent or reduce the severity of bad accidents. You definitely do not wait until the child has a bad accident to teach them this stuff. That’s risk management – moving from a reactive mode to a proactive, preventive mode.”

Managing ever-present risks becomes much more complicated in the corporate world where a problem in one area can cause a ripple effect throughout the organization. Similarly, with a major portion of the nation’s critical infrastructure being owned and managed by the private sector, “government needs to engage business around the topic of security,” she said, to effectively manage the web of risks threatening both the public and private sectors.

“We need the next generation of employees – from economists to engineers to chemists and supply chain specialists - to be skilled in risk management,” she said. “They need a common language, tools and technologies that everyone is familiar with,” she said.

During her visits at NC State, Elkins meets with faculty from business, engineering and other colleges to foster interest in ERM-related research and multidisciplinary graduate education. She’s also meeting with the ERM Initiative faculty – Mark Beasley, director of the initiative and professor of accounting, and Bruce Branson, associate professor of accounting and another ERM Initiative faculty member – to start developing graduate business curriculum in the topic.

Elkins also attends NC State’s ERM Roundtables held each spring and fall, joining in the discussions about ERM best practices. The Roundtables have been drawing about 130 participants for each session since they began over two years ago, Beasley said.

“GM is volunteering my time and covering my expenses as I work with the university – and particularly the ERM Initiative – to promote skills and curriculum development in this important, growing field,” Elkins said. “Together, we are striving to develop a stock of knowledge about enterprise risk management and to teach on ERM in the related core sciences.”