Managing Alignment Risks -- Part II: Qualitative Assessment

by Alexandre G. Rodrigues

In my last Advisor ( 2 August 2000), I talked about the importance of practicing risk management for effective business-IT alignment. I described risk management as a cyclical process, comprised of five main stages: identification, qualitative assessment, quantitative assessment, development of risk responses, and monitoring of implemented responses. At the core of this process is the risk register, a table where identified risks are logged, described, ranked, and monitored. Although there is no universal template for the information to be stored in this table, I proposed some core elements: the rank, the risk description, the estimated impact, the likelihood, the classification (i.e., type of risk), the owner, and the associated mitigating actions.