As payroll services provider Paychex increasingly acknowledged the importance of enterprise risk management, the company decided to go beyond ERM's bottom-line protections to value creation, in effect "turning from defense to offense," says Frank Fiorille, director of ERM at Paychex, which took the bronze award in this category last year.

Like many other organizations, Paychex had implemented a standardized ERM framework to address compliance issues and discern and respond to strategic and operational risks more expeditiously and affirmatively. Fiorille, who championed the ERM initiative at Paychex, says the company has now engaged the next level of ERM–the development of revenue opportunities.

"This is where ERM is evolving toward, taking this infrastructure, team of people, processes and tools used for the most part to manage uncertainty, protect shareholder value and keep the company out of the newspapers, and now leveraging it to actually enhance shareholder value," he explains.