Risk Register Database to Improve Organizational Resilience and Knowledge Management

Kurzfassung

Risk monitoring is a fundamental part of risk management that allows detecting changes that might affect the risk consequences and their likelihood. To be effective, the process requires storing the risk information into a so-called risk register. This paper presents an implementation that is realized in form of a relational database. We present the complete table schema of the database and discuss what motivated the different features. We believe that certain aspects of our schema improve its application in comparison to related works. A noteworthy characteristic is the separation of the risk scenarios and risk analyses in different tables. This feature relates to the fact that the same scenario can be assessed within multiple analyses, in which individual circumstances may result in different risk levels. Moreover, different analyses can apply distinct risk criteria. Thus, the analysis-specific criterion must be stored in the database as a risk matrix. A risk scenario includes an entity or item that is the subject being considered in that scenario. This subject can be a system or organization or a subpart of a system or organization. Due to this reason, the schema allows a hierarchical categorization of entities. The developed schema also employs ideas from the object-oriented programming approach, which allows entities to inherit already defined risk scenarios. This paper further presents a browser based user interface to access the database.