Using Risk Assessment to Support Decision Making

An effective and mature risk governance program drives better decision making in all directions of an organization: up to leadership and the board, down to individual contributors and laterally to all lines of business. Risk-aware decision making, regardless of the domain (e.g., finance, technology, enterprise, cyber), is the cornerstone of effective resource management at any organization.

COBIT® 5 for Risk defines a risk assessment as “[T]he process used to identify and qualify or quantify risk and its potential effects,” describing the identification, scoping, analysis and control evaluation. Successful organizations integrate the entire risk management life cycle process with business decision making, but how do they do so? First, the organization must know what a decision is and how decisions drive risk assessment activities—not the other way around. After this is understood, the rest of the pieces fall into place.

What Is a Decision?

Without a decision, a risk assessment is, at best, busywork. At worst, it produces an unfocused, time-intensive effort that does not help leaders achieve their objectives. Information risk professionals operate in a fast, ever-changing and often chaotic environment, and there is not enough time to assess every risk, every vulnerability and every asset. Identifying the underlying decision driving the risk assessment ensures that the activity is meaningful, ties to business objectives and is not just busywork.

The idea that risk analysis helps decision making by reducing uncertainty is as old as probabilistic thinking itself. The concept was formalized by Ron A. Howard, a decision science professor at Stanford University (California, USA), in his influential 1963 paper, Decision Analysis: Applied Decision Theory.1 He formalized and defined the components of a decision, all of which can be used to focus risk assessment activities.

Components of a Decision

Howard identifies 3 components of a decision: choice, information and preference (figure 1).2 Together they are the foundation of decision-making; without all 3, a decision cannot be made. The decision maker uses logic to identify and evaluate the components individually and together, leading to a conclusion.

Once the risk analyst understands the components and how they work together, it is easy to see how they support a risk decision:

Choice—This describes what the decision maker can do. There must be multiple courses of action possible for a decision to be made. With only one course of action, there is no decision.
Preference—The decision maker must have a preference or inclination for a desired outcome. For example, in information risk, the decision maker often prefers to optimize user functionality, effective security, efficient resource allocation (i.e., money, time, people) or some combination of these options. Understanding the requestor's preferences is a valuable exercise to help scope a risk assessment. The decision maker should be able to articulate what the requestor wants to achieve as an outcome of the decision.
Information—Information is an equal part of the trio when making a decision, and information is also an integral part of any risk assessment. When making a decision—and by extension, assessing risk—information is available from a variety of sources.

Framing a Risk Assessment as Decision Support

If any of these components are missing, there is no decision to be made and, by extension, a risk assessment will be an exercise in frustration that will not yield valuable results. If the risk analyst starts a risk assessment by identifying the choice, preference and information, the assessment will be easier to focus and scope. Alternately, one may conclude that a risk assessment is not necessary or a different methodology may be more appropriate.

ISACA’s Risk IT Framework, 2nd Edition describes 3 high-level steps in the risk assessment process:

Risk identification
Risk analysis
Evaluating the business impact(s) of the identified risk

Integrating the decision-making process into risk assessment steps requires the analyst to ask questions to understand the full scope of the decision before and during the risk identification phase. This provides the opportunity to align assessment activities with the organization’s strategic objectives.

Figure 2 provides a simple matrix that illustrates this.

*Figure 2—Understanding the Decision Before and During Risk Identification*

Real-World Examples

Here are 3 common examples of poorly scoped risk assessment requests and tips for the risk analyst to clarify the decision and determine if risk analysis is the right tool.

Risk Assessment Request 1
“An employee on the development team keeps unjoining his computer from the Active Directory Domain Service (AD DS) to avoid system updates and required device management. Can you perform a risk assessment on this so we can force the employee to stop doing it?"

What Is Missing?
Choice. There is not a clearly articulated choice or alternatives. The requestor is presenting only one choice: forcing an employee to do something specific. In other words, the requestor does not need help in deciding what to do.

What Is an Alternative Approach?
Management or human resources (HR) action and escalation are most appropriate here, assuming there is a written policy for security circumvention and IT management software uninstalls. A risk assessment would be appropriate here if there were a choice to be made such as, “Should the enterprise let users circumvent endpoint management, and, if so, what is the risk?” A risk assessment would help management weigh the risk and benefits and make a decision.

Risk Assessment Request 2
“We are evaluating 2 different antivirus vendors to replace our existing solution, and we need a risk assessment to help us decide.”

What Is Missing?
Preference. The decision maker has not expressed the desired outcome from the decision. Are there security concerns, cost savings or usability issues with the current solution? Without a clearly defined preference, the assessment will be unfocused and could analyze the wrong risk.

What Is an Alternative Approach?
Interviewing leadership and asking why they are considering switching vendors and what information needs to be included in the risk assessment will aid the decision. A requirements comparison matrix would be a good first step, comparing product features and potential security issues. After developing a list of gaps each product has, a risk assessment may be the best path forward, but it needs to be scoped. For example, a potential gap might be, "Product Y is cheaper than Product Z, but it is missing these 3 security features. What additional risk exposure would Product Y introduce to the organization?"

Risk Assessment Request 3
“I would like you to assess black swan cyberevents.”

What Is Missing?
Information. According to Nassim Taleb, who coined and popularized the term in the modern business context, a black swan event is an “outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations.”3 Only a true clairvoyant can look into the future and predict events that are unknowable today.

What Is an Alternative Approach?
The decision maker may be misunderstanding the term “black swan.” It would be useful to ask, “Do you mean high-impact, low-probability events?” If that is the case, a series of risk assessments can be performed to identify control weaknesses that affect business resilience.

Conclusion

Risk assessments are an excellent tool to reduce uncertainty when making decisions, but they are often misapplied when not directly connected to an overall decision-making process. The failure to frame a risk assessment as decision support, supported by the 3 decision components, decouples the analysis effort from business objectives. Time is wasted by performing assessments when there is not a decision to be made, when there is a lack of complete information or when there is no understanding of the preference of the individuals responsible for the decisions. Having clear, complete information and understanding the motivations and options behind a decision help frame the assessment in a meaningful manner.

This understanding will help develop a response the next time someone drops off a 170-page vulnerability scan report and asks for a risk assessment on it.

Endnotes

1 Howard, R. A.; “Decision Analysis: Applied Decision Theory,“ Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Operational Research,” 1966
2 Edwards, W.; R. F. Miles, Jr.; D. Von Winterfeldt (eds.).; Advances in Decision Analysis: From Foundations to Applications, Cambridge University Press, USA, 2007
3 Taleb, N. N.; “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,” The New York Times, 22 April 2007