CIO — Since 9,000 B.C., when cattle served as the world's first money, people have plotted to steal it. Herders knew that taking too long to get cows across Mesopotamia meant leaving yourself open to a deadly arrow in the heart. Now, as then, time makes money handlers vulnerable.

Last October in Philadelphia, two Loomis guards were killed as they collected cash and checks from a Wachovia ATM on their route. Surveillance tapes from that morning show a man sat in a car nearby, watching the armored truck arrive.

One guard went to the bank machine, while the other remained with the truck. The killer put on gloves, walked over and shot them both with a 9-mm handgun, police said in published reports, getting away with a bag of deposits from the ATM. A man arrested in the case is charged with murder and robbery and awaits trial. Companies in other industries may not face such dire threats, but analyzing and mitigating corporate risk, in whatever form, is a growing part of the CIO's job. (Read a related story, Hot Jobs: IT Security Manager) Of 316 IT leaders surveyed by CIO in June, 62 percent say they are very or extremely interested in risk management, up from 58 percent last year. And more CIOs are applying IT to help manage corporate risk—38 percent, according to our 2008 "State of the CIO" survey, up from 30 percent a year earlier.

Wayne Sadin, CIO at Loomis, knows that no amount of technology will eradicate crime. But he's counting on a new enterprise wireless application to shrink Loomis's exposure to it. Guards will use a smartphone system to replace the tedious, error-prone paperwork they normally fill out by hand, making each stop on a route faster.

The new application is rolling out across the country this year and next but hasn't yet made it to Loomis's Philadelphia region. It's hard to know what effect it might have had on the robbery-murder there. But computerizing the fieldwork of guards cuts the amount of time—and thus the level of vulnerability—at each stop, Sadin says.

Plus, the real-time system produces more accurate information sooner about inventory—customers' money—in transit each day. Loomis can then offer the data to those customers, such as banks, retailers and restaurant chains. This helps Loomis achieve another goal familiar to many CIOs: Reduce the risk of customer flight. "Information about money is sometimes as valuable as money itself," Sadin says. "If we can give people that, it makes it harder to switch away from us."

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