An approach for analyzing the effects of risks on business processes using semantic annotations

Abstract

The management of risks has gained a lot of attention in the last years. Among the current challenges in this domain are the integration of risk management in the strategic planning and performance management across business units and organizational structures, the assessment of a company's risk bearing capacity, and the improvement of the methods of risk measurement. In order to support the elicitation of risks in business processes, measure their impact on a company's return and provide reports for regulatory authorities, it can be reverted to technology-oriented knowledge management. In this context we propose an approach that uses semantically annotated models to represent the influence of risks on business activities based on the concepts provided by a risk knowledge base. By transferring the annotated model information to the knowledge base, inference rules can be applied to analyze the effects of risks on the business processes during subsequent capacity simulations. For a first evaluation the approach has been implemented using the ADOxx meta modeling platform, the Protégé ontology management toolkit and the Jess rule engine. Finally, the use of the implementation is shortly illustrated by reverting to a sample business process from the domain of banking.