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CEO and President
Awareity

Tipped off by the Importance of Foresight

Software designed to help colleges and other institutions identify troubled students or employees before they act is often a matter of life and death.

Anyone following the news has heard terrible stories of school and workplace violence, from the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre to cyberbullying incidents that have in some instances led to suicide. Rick Shaw, CEO and president of Awareity in Lincoln, Neb., is finding ways to stop such incidents from occurring.

Shaw has developed TIPS--for Threat Assessment, Incident Management and Prevention Services--software designed to help colleges and other institutions identify troubled students or employees, and to intervene before they harm themselves or others.

TIPS aims to counter a common security problem at schools, which is that the vast majority of incidents, ranging from threats to bullying to sexual assault, go unreported.

"You can't prevent situations you don't know about," Shaw said.

The system starts by making reporting easier, adding a button to an institution's own website that allows anyone to file an anonymous report. The reporting form features a drop-down list of various types of incidents--cyberbullying, for example--and asks for the date and time of the incident, the identities of the person being reported and any victims, and a description of the incident.

A school may designate teams of people to be automatically notified of certain types of reports, and the system allows team members to create a record of recommendations and actions taken, keeping track of which members view and add to the record and notifying members of new information.

TIPS also allows teams to upload material from outside sources, such as Facebook pages, and can be set to alert members for follow-up on individual cases. "When you forget to follow up with an at-risk individual, bad things can happen," Shaw said.

Threat assessment team members can include not only a school's counselors and safety officers but also its lawyers and local police, he said. Including legal counsel can protect sensitive information under attorney-client privilege, while the involvement of law enforcement may shield data from Freedom of Information Act requests, Shaw said.

The web-based TIPS system is remotely accessible by laptop or smartphone, meaning that team members can stay in touch wherever they are, said Claire Good, associate vice president and dean of students at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Ky., which has been using TIPS since February.

"The system made it so simple, so easy" to track individual cases, she said.

Awareity also responded quickly to requests to customize the system, Good said. Eastern Kentucky wanted, for instance, to combine incident reports with information from the company's Campus Aggression Protection System to show changes in the level of subjects' aggressive behavior.

"They didn't discourage anything I had to say," Good said. "They implemented it right away."

Shaw came to his new work with long experience in computer systems and computer network security, including stints as a manager at Electronic Data Systems--now part of Hewlett Packard Co.--and as a data specialist at MCI Inc., since acquired by Verizon Inc.

He started his own security company, CorpNet Security, in 1998, providing "white hat hacking" services to clients looking to spot weaknesses in their systems.

Throughout, he said, he came to realize that "people are the weakest link" in any security system, and that there were few tools available to deal with threats from an institution's own employees or from its students.

He founded Awareity in 2002, and the first product the company launched was a software platform called Managed Ongoing Awareness and Trust, or MOAT.

MOAT offers web-based employee training and documentation for compliance with an institution's own policies and with laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

From there, Shaw developed TIPS. About a dozen schools have adopted the system so far, he said, though its applicability extends beyond campuses. A handful of healthcare companies and banks also have implemented it, he said.

TIPS may prove especially useful for banks, he said, in preventing liabilities that could arise from the whistleblower provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

-- Douglas McLeod

Red Flags of Foresight

Rick Shaw remembers the horrific events at Virginia Tech so vividly.

It was April 16, 2007, the day 23-year-old English major Seung-Hui Cho stalked, shot and eventually killed 32 students and faculty, himself included, and wounded 25 others.

"My first reaction was, 'How big is it? How bad is it? This is horrible,' " Shaw said. "With my safety and prevention on the brain, my next thought was, 'Was this preventable?' "

The question for Shaw wasn't one of second-guessing the killer's actions; it was already too late for that. For Shaw, the question was how the tragedy could have been prevented.

In hindsight, he said, there are often "a lot of red flags," leading up to an incident, but hindsight isn't good enough. It's always too late. No victim was ever saved by the shield of hindsight.

That's where his Threat Assessment, Incident Management and Prevention Services (TIPS) Web-based software, designed to flag warning signs before an individual explodes, comes in.

Shaw is a Responsibility Leader® because he created a system to make campuses safer in a time when we desperately need them to be; his is an innovation clearly motivated by a desire to save lives.

Manager, Decision Support and Analytics, Global Risk Management Division
ARAMARK Corp.

A Big Thinker with Intellect to Spare

For John Toczek, the statistics are the easy part. Turning the data into digestible, presentable information for clients is where the innovation lies.

John Toczek manages the five-person decision support and analytics team, part of the global risk management division at ARAMARK Corp. It's a small team but it has companywide impact.

"Our goal is to enable other departments to make data-driven decisions," he said.

Although Toczek brings a statistics background to his job, he realizes that one stumbling block is the discomfort many people have with data. "In general, people don't like to look at a lot of data," he said. "They want something they can interact with."

This understanding, that the crucial information provided by the data needs to be conveyed in a more interactive and easy-to-grasp manner, led to the development of Interactive Risk Simulators (IRS).

The simulators are tools that visually portray statistical relationships between business metrics like employee tenure, employee engagement, a trained workforce and account tenure, and risk management metrics such as Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) incident rates, workers' compensation rates and customer injuries.

The simulators use gauges and interactive sliders to answer questions such as how more employee engagement tends to lower the OSHA incident rates. "Once you understand the links, you can control your risk better because you know which actions are going to be most effective at mitigating that risk," he said.

Toczek said the risk simulators meet the challenge of making complicated material accessible for a lay audience.

The work that led to the creation of the simulators began a few years ago during a discussion with Andrew Pelcin, director of decision support for global risk management, about the relationship between actions taken by front-line managers, food-service directors, district managers, and general managers in the field, and the effect of their decisions on ARAMARK's risk metrics.

"There's a lot of collaboration where we'll sit in front of the whiteboard and say 'What could we do with this information we have, and how do we deliver it to the people who are going to consume it?' " Pelcin said.

Pelcin said Toczek excels at translating complicated statistical information into easy-to-understand material. "He's phenomenal at delivering this information. It's one thing to make a statistical model, but the challenge is making it so the information can be consumed by anyone at any level almost without an explanation. You can't have an innovative solution if it can't get accepted as well."

Ken Bowman, vice president of safety risk and control at ARAMARK, raves about Toczek's abilities. "He's one of the smartest people I ever worked with. He's really interested in the next big challenge, in figuring out what the business problem is,'' Bowman said "He really likes to have things to think about and to solve problems. He is extremely customer focused and a good listener. He's resonated very much with our field population and been able to really use their feedback to enhance tools they've developed."

Development of the risk simulator progressed slowly at first.

The decision support team also works with other departments within the company, including claims, safety and risk control, and quality assurance. Those are its primary internal clients, and they support the needs of the field and other departments within ARAMARK.

Work on the risk simulator project continued during spare time, in a company atmosphere where innovation was encouraged. "Leadership here understands the value in innovation, so they make sure the employees have time to create those kinds of things," Toczek said.

Once the risk simulator was ready for testing, it went to what Toczek describes as "200 beta-testers we keep on hand to try things out.'' The product went out across the organization, up to regional vice presidents and down to front-line managers for feedback, Bowman said. The product was then tweaked and finally unveiled.

The risk simulator is available to all the lines of business, but not to every individual. Rollout continues, and preliminary feedback is positive, Pelcin said.

Pelcin praised Toczek's accomplishment: "It's that simple solution that you explain to someone and they say 'Why didn't we think of that five years ago?' When I slide the part-time employee ratio and they see that this affects your OSHA rate and how, they get it.

"Everyone understands how risk management plays into the greater organization and how their business directions are going to affect the larger mix. The fact it's visual really helps people understand.

"There are probably a million people in the world who could do the statistics, but to figure out a way to display it so simply and yet get all the points across, that's the beauty of this," Pelcin said.

-- By Lynn Rosen

Communicating Through the Statistics

ARAMARK was faced with the challenge of determining the statistical relationship between business metrics, employee tenure, employee engagement, and risk metrics such as workers' compensation injury rate and rate of customer injuries.

What John Toczek came up with was Interactive Risk Simulators, a system that would allow managers to make theoretical adjustments in business metrics and watch how those changes would affect risk metrics. ARAMARK's global risk management team surveyed more than 200 of the company's managers on the new system.

This ability to communicate and execute complex risk concepts to a wider audience, including line managers, food service directors, district managers and general managers, has helped to bridge the risk communication gap in ARAMARK's various departments.

Toczek is a Responsibility Leader® because the accessibility and the simplicity of his innovation will allow it to be duplicated in other companies and industries.

As Toczek's process is duplicated and/or licensed, workers with other companies will be much more comfortable in assessing the connection between risk management and the business processes. This should result in safer workplaces and greater efficiency.

Founder/Product Architect
Active Agenda LLC

Sourcing a New Agenda in the Open

Dan Zahlis creates his own risk management software to reduce workplace risk, joins the open-source community, and then gives his code away.

Eight years ago, Dan Zahlis was a practicing risk manager for a very large and recognizable ice cream company, responsible for managing operational risk across the country.

He had to manage multiple facilities in multiple states with multiple functional departments--a very frustrating experience, as he recalled it.

"They were all attempting to manage risk using disparate systems and isolated information," he said. "I wanted a system that would allow our organization to streamline risk management using single systems to manage all types of risk across our global enterprise."

First, he turned to the insurance brokerage industry for solutions to the problem (the company was self-insured), but came up empty handed. So he did something drastic: He decided to create his own risk management software.

That was back in 2003, and by 2006 after money collected via what Zahlis called the "Three F's" (family, friends and fools) method, he thought he could find an investor to help him take his technology to the marketplace. Well, it didn't quite work out. Investors got greedy, he said.

So Zahlis turned to open source, a development method for software that "harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process," as he defined it.

Today, Zahlis' open source efforts are going strong, and he offers his risk management system solution for free. (The code is at sourceforge.net/projects/activeagenda.)

"Open source's promise is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost and an end to predatory vendor lock-in," Zahlis said.

"Our project mission is to reduce workplace risk through global collaborative development and free distribution of open technologies and ideas," he said. "Our software consists of more than 100 integrated risk-control modules."

As Zahlis explained it, by being an open source solution, his source code is implemented any way a user chooses to implement it. In most cases, the code is implemented by organizations on their local servers. In some cases, the application is implemented as a hosted service by independent service providers (Active Agenda, based in Clovis, Calif., will do it for a fee).

"We implement development by posting our work to a source code management system on the Internet," he said. "Anyone in the world can download our code. The only condition we place on using it is that improvements must be shared with the global community."

"I am very proud to have thoroughly evaluated and even been able to raise points of interest to Dan's app, which is everything I have been complaining we didn't have already when working for major brokers," said Nicolas Schnuderl, future manager, Croci Caraibes, and formerly an international account executive for both Aon France and Gras Savoye in France. "Active Agenda is scalable, highly customizable and benefits from decades of experience in the field."

Zahlis said the only true measurement he has of the impact of the firm's innovation is the number of people downloading the source code, which amounts to about 5,000 downloads so far; organizations like banks, municipalities, wineries, hospitals and universities, visiting the project website; and the people contacting Active Agenda for support or to provide feedback.

"Our web logs register visitors from around the globe and include a virtual who's who of businesses, not-for-profits, and government entities," he said.

The source code is being used "in ways we will never know," he said. One user, a winery in Australia, would not mention it by name in a recent magazine article because the winery considers the code a competitive advantage.

Right now, Zahlis is trying to convince brokers and carriers how smart it would be to provide sponsorships for his open source project, but it's been tough sledding.

"I tried the proprietary route and ran into the problems of people trying to lock it down and control it," he said. "But the idea of open source is you are going to release it and it gets built by people really interested in solving the problem."

Zahlis said his larger project agenda is to change the "culture" of the risk management industry by illustrating the power of open source principles to shed light upon problems that can result in loss. "Making this enterprise risk management tool available to the world for free eliminates many of the financial, political, and territorial barriers to organizations trying to manage risk," he said.

-- Tom Starner

Opening the Mind

A skilled manager working nearly 10 years ago for a premium food brand, Daniel F. Zahlis was searching for a solution to improve his self-insured employer's processes.

He found himself stymied at every turn. Redundancy, inertia, vested interests, deaf ears all took their toll. Tired but resolute, Zahlis decided to venture out on his own only to be rebuffed by cloistered, impatient, risk-averse communities of investors.

Dispirited, Zahlis decided to join the open-source community. The collaboration snowballed as others pitch in to help Zahlis develop new applications.

Sure enough, Zahlis flourished. Within weeks, his innovations attracted inquiries from as far away as Cape Verde Islands off the West Coast of Africa, to wineries in Australia.

Before long, Zahlis found himself giving away the source code for his new risk management application. Today, his open source efforts at Active Agenda are going strong. With a tagline that reads "Controlling loss, not minds, methods, or markets," Active Agenda doesn't need a mission statement.

Zahlis is a Responsibility Leader® because he has made his work available for free to benefit employees, customers and their community.