Workflow Based Risk Management Approach

The management of operational risks is receiving increasing attention as a fundamental part of monitoring, controlling and decision support systems. However, organizations are reluctant to support risk management programs probably because of the high cost of human resources necessary for acquisition, manipulation and analysis of risk data. The paper presents an approach to continuous risk management which exploits the workflow management technology. The capability to measure executable process instances provided by a Workflow Management System (WfMS) is assumed as a major premise for the design of a workflow based risk management system. The benefits deriving from this approach are manifold: first, the responsibility of data collection necessary to risk evaluation at workflow execution time is assigned to the WfMS that can automatically record execution data. Second the workflow performance measurement capability can be exploited as a fundamental mechanism that can feed a framework of key risk indicators. Third, a proactive police can be planned to risk treatment at workflow execution time when there is still time to react to adverse events. In the following, the model of a workflow oriented risk management system, the fundamental performance measures of workflow and some example of workflow based key risk indicators are discussed.