FULLY FUNDED Engineering Doctorate (EngD) Studentship in Business Intelligence for Governance & Compliance, Sponsored by Neural Insights

Applications are invited for a student to work on a project in applying the techniques of Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence to Governance, Risk and Compliance Systems, with the objective of improving businesses’ ability to make decisions relating to operational risk, regulation and legislation, initially in the financial sector.

The project is fully funded and will be carried out in conjunction with studying for an EngD in Large Scale Complex IT Systems at the University of York.

The EngD is a full time, 4-year doctoral level research degree involving taught and research components requiring the Research Engineer to work with a sponsoring organisation - Neural Insights.

Neural Insights is a leading strategic management consulting firm. It combines deep industry knowledge with specialised expertise in strategy, technology, operations, risk management, and applied business intelligence.

The Research Project: Business Intelligence for Governance & Compliance
The project will combine research with practical implementation. It will require research into methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies for modeling and interpreting data related to a firm’s GRC, its internal operating model processes and the external risk profile. It will also require practical work on integration, visualization and implementation using industry standard platforms.

In order to achieve this we believe an in depth analysis of methods available to model processes and controls in such a way as to quickly capture a firm’s operating model will be required.

Over the last decade, the focus on compliance has changed the way in which Financial Services firms understand and manage risks. Risk management has become driven by events, triggered either by a breach, as in the case of rogue trading, or a change to regulation, as in the case of Dodd-Frank. This makes it harder to link risk management activity to both business strategy and a firm’s operating model in a systematic and analytic way. The net regulatory drag on a business is unmeasured and hampers its flexibility, agility, cost performance and ultimately regulatory performance, too. On top of this, regulatory penalties and cost to reputation have become prohibitive.

All of these obstacles need to be addressed within a firm’s Governance, Risk and Compliance framework. Providing business intelligence combining strategy with compliance and operational performance should be every firm’s goal. Top quadrant performers will integrate their compliance into the corporate decision making process, but will need a more complete understanding of control structures, the fit within the operating model and a robust Business Intelligence framework to achieve this. They will also use process and control analytics to evaluate Regulatory Drag and make business decisions accordingly.
The GRC systems that support these activities have in the main failed to deliver the system and data integration and advanced analytics that firms need to manage regulatory compliance in the context of overall operational risk.

The project will involve design and development of tools to integrate a number of GRC, regulatory and operational risk data sources, perform data analysis to generate relevant KPI’s and KRI’s and visualize decision making information in an integrated way.