Annie Searle | The Risk Detective

Annie Searle is a full time faculty lecturer at the University of Washington’s School of Information, where she teaches graduate courses on risk management, on the foundations of information management, as well as a course on ethics, policy and law with respect to information management. She is a lifetime member of The Institute of American Entrepreneurs, and a 2011 inductee into The Hall of Fame for Women in Homeland Security and Emergency Management. Since 2007, she has been an invited participant at New York University’s Global Roundtable on Public-Private Preparedness; and a member of RPCFIRST, the Regional Partnership Council, an umbrella organization formed in 2005 to foster collaboration on on homeland security and emergency management issues with the public sector.

Annie Searle is also principal of Annie Searle & Associates LLC – also known as ASA Risk Consultants -- an independent advisory firm, serving businesses and organizations that are part of the nation’s critical infrastructure.

For the past seven years, Annie Searle & Associates (ASA) has worked with companies or agencies from our nation's critical infrastructure sectors to better manage a range of risks that spring from the four operational risk dimensions of any organization—people, processes, systems and external events. We've done that through the two divisions of the firm.

The ASA Institute for Risk and Innovation offers the latest high level threat analyses and risk assessments on a wide variety of real world issues in order to drive policy and regulatory changes. They publish at least one new research note monthly in our newsletter, ASA News & Notes, along with a column written by Annie Searle each month that examines risk challenges in the public and private sector. Annie comments daily on the news article of the day via Annie's Take. From the research notes published first in the newsletter has come the Reflections on Risk series of books, with Volume III published in December 2015.

ASA's consulting services drive improvements in an organization's policies, programs and business practices. Our toolset includes executive briefings, risk assessments with roadmaps, executive risk retreats, scenario design and testing.

Prior to founding ASA in 2009, Searle spent ten years at Washington Mutual Bank (WaMu), where for most of those years she was responsible on a company-wide level for business continuity, disaster recovery, technology risk and compliance, technology change management, and (for several years) for vendor and application information security. As Senior Vice President for Enterprise Risk Services, Annie and her teams redesigned and rebuilt those programs to world-class status, utilizing a federated model in partnership with the bank’s lines of business. Over those years, her team reduced regulatory and audit risk by over 30%, reduced operating budgets year over year by 10-15%, and reduced downtime from natural disasters or technology outages by over 50% in five years. Searle also chaired WaMu’s Crisis Management Team and was the executive sponsor of the bank’s technology innovation program.

Prior to joining Washington Mutual in 1999, Searle co-founded and served for 15 years as president and CEO of Delphi Computers & Peripherals. For her work at Delphi, Searle won the 1992 Northwest Entrepreneur of the Year award from Inc. magazine and Ernst & Young; and the Matrix Table Woman of Achievement award in 1994 from the Women in Communications organization.

Searle holds Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in literature from the University of Iowa. She is a member of the boards of the Seattle Public Library Foundation; and a former board member of The Millionair Club Charity; NPower Seattle; Washington Works; and the Washington Commission for the Humanities. Her professional affiliations include membership in the Business Executives for National Security; the International Network of Women in Emergency Management and Homeland Security; the Women’s Executive Forum; InfraGard; and the Global Association of Risk Partners (GARP).

Annie Searle is accomplished author, expert and is asked to speak on matters related to risk management on a global scale. Searle’s first book focused on identifying and handling personal risk at home, at work, online, and on the road, titled Advice From A Risk Detective (Tautegory Press, October 2011). A second, expanded edition of the book was published in 2013 and includes a new section looking at school risks as well as updated advice on smart technology, social media and privacy. The ASA Institute for Risk and Innovation has published three volumes to date in a series focused on current topics in operational risk: Reflections on Risk (22 research notes) appeared in 2011; and Reflections on Risk II (26 research notes) appeared in 2014. A third volume, Reflections on Risk III, with 16 different contributors and 26 research notes, appeared in December of 2015.

Searle’s past and upcoming conference presentations include: • “How Did I Get Here Stories,” 14th Annual Executive Women’s Forum (October 2016) “Ethical Misconduct: Our Largest Operational Risk?,” OpRisk North America (March 2016). She is available for conferences and public speaking, but has restricted consulting engagements to the summer months. For more information about Annie Searle, please visit her website anniesearle.com.