Enterprise risk management: A systems-thinking framework for the event identification phase

Guidelines for developing and implementing a program of enterprise risk management have been developed by the Committee on Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission. One component of this risk management program is event identification, which involves developing a list of events that could affect the ability of the enterprise to meet its strategic and operating objectives. The guidelines establish objectives for event identification and suggest general procedures for identifying events that represent business risks. In this paper, I describe how systems-thinking could provide a framework to identify events that should be considered during risk assessment by (a) creating a map of the organization's value chain that specifies relationships among the atomic components of the business model, and (b) using a taxonomy of categories to analyze those relationships and identify events that could threaten business process performance.