The global financial crisis got Honeywell thinking about its approach to identifying, assessing and managing risk. While it had a structure in place, finance began to wonder if it was too strict–inhibiting the company's growth and shareholder value.

"We've got a complex organization, with about 120,000 employees and lots of different business models in the different industries we play in across more than 100 countries," says Kathleen Winters, corporate controller and vice president at Morristown, N.J.-based Honeywell. "Our complex global business activities continuously exposed us to risk. We needed a more comprehensive and integrated framework to pinpoint and analyze these risks to manage them more effectively."

Finance took on the job, developing and implementing a database that is fed answers to questions designed to unearth and analyze data about risks, data that's used to manage aggregate risk across the global organization.