SAN ANTONIO — In looking to implement an enterprise risk management program, crafting an ERM approach that's in line with the organization's culture is critical to the program's success, according to a panel of risk practitioners speaking Monday at the Risk & Insurance Management Society Inc.'s 2012 Enterprise Risk Management Conference in San Antonio.

At accounting and advisory firm Eide Bailly L.L.P., the firm's partnership structure was among the factors that had to be considered in moving toward enterprise risk management, said Mary Peter, the firm's Minneapolis-based director of enterprise risk management.

“Working with a partnership is much, much different than a corporation. You have lots of bosses,” Ms. Peter said. “And if they're not on the same page, you're going in a lot of different directions.”

To address those nuances of a partnership, it was essential to secure top level support for the ERM effort and make sure the process of developing the program was cross-functional and strategy-driven, Ms. Peter said.

At St. Paul, Minn.-based Affinity Plus Federal Credit Union, “The culture … is very strongly based on our key stakeholder and the key stakeholder is the customer,” said David Seibert, Affinity Plus' risk management officer. That drives an organization in which decision-making is kept close to the members, with the majority of the company's employees being “member advisers” who have considerable empowerment to make decisions.

In that arrangement, Affinity Plus imposes few preventive controls on those member advisers and more “detective” controls. The ERM program created had to embrace that detective control environment, as well as the company's decentralization while analyzing how much risk that decentralization and the member adviser empowerment creates, Mr. Seibert said.

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Restaurant chain Buffalo Wild Wings Inc.’s culture is marked largely by the company’s rapid growth, so an ERM program imposing too much structure would never work, said Daniel Quandt, the company’s Minneapolis-based director of internal audit.

“We were never going to get there if we first built all this structure,” Mr. Quandt said. “Our culture just wouldn’t permit it.”

Instead the program at Buffalo Wild Wings focuses largely on goals and successes, and focuses more on dialogue and getting people talking about risks rather than producing reports, Mr. Quandt said. “Our program is probably at least as much art as science. It’s probably as much about process as it is about product,” he said. “That’s the only thing that would fit with our culture. Our management team just wouldn’t do it any other way.”

“We very much as a part of ERM try to talk about our strategies and our initiatives and anything that stands in the way of our strategic initiatives is a risk,” Mr. Quandt said.