IT Risk & Controls
Operational Risk: The Blind Spot of Most IT Teams

Operational Risk: The Blind Spot of Most IT Teams

When IT teams talk about “risk,” the conversation tends to collapse into two buckets:

  • Cybersecurity (threats, vulnerabilities, attack surfaces)
  • Compliance (audits, findings, controls, frameworks)

Both matter. But in regulated environments, the failures that hurt most often come from a third bucket—one that rarely makes the slide deck:

👉 Operational risk.

Not the hacker.
Not the auditor.
The way work actually gets done—when no one is watching.

The risk no framework sees until it’s too late

Operational risk isn’t abstract. It’s specific, familiar, and usually rationalized:

  • Manual steps with no clear owner
  • “Temporary” workarounds that became the process
  • Controls that exist on paper, not in execution
  • Systems that function—because humans quietly compensate
  • Critical knowledge concentrated in one or two people

Why it gets ignored is simple: it hides in success.
Nothing breaks—so it must be fine.

Until it isn’t.

Why audits and cyber controls often miss it

Audits typically test for:

  • Is there a defined process?
  • Is it approved?
  • Is there evidence?

Cybersecurity typically focuses on:

  • External threats
  • Technical vulnerabilities
  • Exposure and detection

Operational risk lives in the “in-between”:

  • Incident handling at 3 a.m.
  • Emergency changes that bypass governance
  • Manual handovers between teams
  • The dependency on “that one person” who knows how it really works

None of that shows up neatly in:

  • Risk registers
  • Control catalogs
  • Audit sampling
  • Standard reporting

Yet it’s behind a disproportionate share of real outages, data integrity issues, and compliance breakdowns—especially during change, pressure, or growth.

The quiet killer: normalization of deviation

Here’s how operational risk becomes invisible:

  • “Yes, we skip that step sometimes.”
  • “We’ll fix it properly later.”
  • “It’s only in exceptional cases.”
  • “We’ve always done it like this.”

Over time:

  • Exceptions become routine
  • Temporary fixes become permanent
  • “Known issues” become “accepted reality”

Then a stressor hits:

  • Higher workload
  • Key person unavailable
  • Major upgrade
  • Incident under pressure

And suddenly the workaround becomes the root cause.

Why leadership often misses it

Operational risk rarely escalates well because it:

  • Doesn’t look urgent
  • Doesn’t come with a clean incident narrative
  • Is hard to quantify in KPIs
  • Sounds like “ops complaining” rather than “risk signaling”

So teams learn the wrong lesson:

  • Don’t escalate unless something breaks
  • Don’t raise concerns without a fully formed solution
  • Don’t slow delivery down

That creates the most dangerous gap in IT:

What leadership believes is under control
vs.
what operators know is fragile

That gap is where incidents are born.

How to actually see operational risk

You won’t find it in the SOP.
You’ll find it by watching the work.

Ask different questions:

  • What happens when this fails—step by step?
  • Who fixes it when things go wrong?
  • Where does “tribal knowledge” substitute documentation?
  • Which manual steps are both critical and invisible?
  • Where do people say “I’ll just take care of it”?

Look for signals:

  • Repeated “temporary” fixes
  • Informal handoffs and side-channel coordination
  • Late-night heroics
  • A dependency map that no one has documented

Heroics are not resilience. They’re debt coming due.

The editorial point most posts miss

Operational risk is not an “ops problem.”

It’s a governance problem:

  • Ownership is unclear
  • Priorities are misaligned
  • Controls are underdesigned for reality
  • Processes assume perfect conditions
  • Documentation exists, but isn’t usable under pressure

Operations didn’t create these risks.
They adapted to survive them.

Good governance doesn’t eliminate operational risk.
It makes it visible, measurable, and manageable.

Final recommendation: how to overcome this

If you want to reduce operational risk without drowning teams in bureaucracy, do three things—consistently:

1) Make “bad-day performance” a first-class requirement

Stop asking only “Are we compliant?”
Start asking: “How does this work on a bad day?”
Bake that into change reviews, service design, and go-live criteria.

2) Convert heroics into standards

Every recurring escalation and “only John can fix it” moment becomes:

  • documented runbook
  • ownership assignment
  • automation candidate
  • tested recovery path
  • measurable control

3) Put operational risk on the executive dashboard

Not as anecdotes—but as trends:

  • single points of failure (people/process/technology)
  • manual critical steps
  • backlog of “temporary” fixes
  • after-hours interventions
  • failed changes / emergency changes ratio

What leadership sees, leadership funds.

Closing (clean, punchy)

Most IT failures don’t come from sophisticated attacks or dramatic non-compliance.

They come from small tolerated weaknesses:

  • invisible dependencies
  • normalized shortcuts
  • people compensating for systems

The strongest IT organizations don’t just aim to be audit-ready.

They build for reality—especially the bad days.

Because that’s where the real risk lives.