Risk management can help organizations by highlighting important risks as inputs to decision making.

 

Risk management should not be about the burden of building and then maintaining highly detailed and structured models of the organization that attempt to map every risk, control, indicator, event and dependency.  These models are typically expensive to build and maintain, are quickly out of date, are imperfect in their assumptions and tend to be rigid.  Instead of risk thinking, they often focus attention on model maintenance and administration.

 

Our philosophy in developing the Ethidex ASSESS application is simple: risk management is focused on outcomes, using tools that enable, with organization models and links, and the related administration, only where necessary.  We recognize that a simpler model and the related data is more transparent, and easier to validate and evolve.  We want to keep “human in the loop” in understanding context, recognizing patterns and applying judgement.

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Our objectives as we develop Ethidex ASSESS are:

• Focusing on risk understanding as an input to related strategy and operational decisions

  • Awareness of exposures, recognition of emerging issues, prioritization of actions, alignment between risks and business decisions

• Creating organizational models of risks, controls etc only as necessary and fit for purpose

• Emphasising usability and minimizing training burden for use across the organization

• Maintaining flexibility that can support a variety of assessment activities, and can adapt quickly as organizations change, supporting resilience

• Minimizing administration, avoiding excessive taxonomies and data mapping

• Meeting regulatory expectations (which emphasize proportionality and “risk based” approaches)