Risk management is not a new concept within the federal sector. What is new is the need to integrate risk management into the strategic and decisionmaking processes that cut across the organization, and abandon the outdated practice of managing risks within functional silos and stovepipes. The purpose of this paper is to provide federal managers with an overview of ERM and what should be considered when implementing ERM. Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) has been recognized as the process for making this integration work. ERM is defined as “a process, effected by an entity’s … management and other personnel, applied in a strategy setting and across the enterprise, designed to identify potential events that may affect the entity, and manage risk to be within its risk appetite, to provide reasonable assurance regarding the achievement of entity objectives” (COSO, 2004). While there is great expectation and hope for this management practice, there are very few success stories and best practices available in the federal sector to benchmark. This is due in part to the multiplicity of missions and objectives of government agencies, which makes it difficult to achieve a uniformed approach to ERM. However, this is not a problem unique to the federal arena. In a recent Enterprise Risk Oversight Survey conducted by the ERM Initiative at North Carolina State University, of 700 entities surveyed across a broad range of industries, 44 percent of respondents said that they had no enterprise-wide risk management process in place and have no plans to implement one (Beasley, Branson, Hancock, 2009). The lack of a standard methodology across the federal sector need not discourage agencies from implementing ERM, as variations in ERM are expected. This is evidenced in the approaches of the agencies featured as case studies in this report: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid. Each agency brings a unique perspective to ERM, driven by different goals and objectives. Yet, despite these differences, each agency’s approach uses the general concepts and context of ERM, whether using specific frameworks, such as the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) Enterprise Risk Management Integrated Framework or the Canadian Integrated Risk Management Framework, as working models.