I have a love/hate relationship with iTunes. I love the ability to download a wide variety of single songs, but it annoys me that I cannot play my iTunes music library on a player other than an iPod, or transfer album purchases easily between computers. Still, while I have peeked into Pandora Radio's box, and flirted with other sites, I keep coming back to iTunes because I love the way it organizes and analyzes digital music.

iTunes Essentials contains groupings of music by performer. Dozens of songs in each artist's catalog are all listed in order of their importance, prioritized in three sections, starting with the artist's most well-known songs: The Basics (the biggest, best and most important songs), Next Steps (usually composed of popular songs just beyond the hits) and in some cases, Deep Cuts (under-appreciated songs.)

Such categorization is also helpful to organize and illustrate the complex measurements involved in risk assessment, the process of gathering and analyzing risk information, and ranking risks by their importance or impact. This is the "second step" of enterprise risk management (ERM), as described in my May 25 blog, Enterprise Risk Management – The Five Course Meal. By aggregating standard risk metric data consistently through the companies, participants are able to analyze and illustrate risk control and assessments across whole organizations.