by Dr. Philip O'Neill, President

RiskOutLook® is a tool for modeling the risks that stem from dependency relationships.

RiskOutLook® is a data-driven application enabling analysts and decision makers to create and manipulate a graph model of business components such as projects, operations, services, resources and communications.

RiskOutLook®; can model any and all infrastructures and the resultant risks that are faced by businesses and governments.

Traditional Risk Management

• Simulation

• Time-consuming to develop

• Time-consuming to populate with data

• Time-comsuming to calibrate against the "real world"

• Low probability paths might not be observed

• Complex paths might not be observed

Using RiskOutLook®

• No programming required

• Exploits expert knowledge

• Uses expert judgment

• Even low probability paths are fathomed algorithmically

• All pathways of risk exposure are determined

The user interface contains a data manager, a graph layout panel and charts for reporting risk

Areas of Application

There are a number of risk modeling problems that can be accomplished with RiskOutLook®:

• Project portfolio management – manage a portfolio of projects that share resources and dependency relationships

• Infrastructure risk analysis – identify and prioritize risk among critical infrastructures and assess the level of interdependence between each pair of infrastructure components.

• Military campaign planning – plan a military campaign with many lines of operation, multiple objectives and decisive points.

• Modeling epidemics – create a “mixing network” model of an epidemic

• Analyzing computer code – build a model of objects and software components and their relationships that can be used to debug and streamline computer code

• Strategic Planning – display and trace the linkages between planning objectives, projects, resources and actions

Because events have consequences, due diligence demands that planners identify pathways of potential exposure to risk. While direct risks are of concern, contingency plans should anticipate the cascading impact of degraded performance resulting from chains of dependency relationships.

RiskOutLook® is a software tool that enables contingency planners and risk managers to identify, visualize and analyze pathways of exposure to risk. It is written in Java for maximum portability and it supports hierarchical modeling for maximum extensibility. Users can share and import and export data in text files so that a backbone modeling framework can be exploited and extended with more detail in areas of interest to particular users.

Users can identify the most significant risk drivers and the most critical vulnerabilities in terms of degree of impact and relative likelihood of occurrence. RiskOutLook® provides graphical depictions of its analysis that can be summarized and filtered to a suitable level of detail within selected areas of concern according to the user’s purpose.

RiskOutLook® supports three main functional areas that do not exist together in any other software application:

• Data Management

  • Provide a data explorer with a hierarchy tree of entities and relationships

  • Tag data to the entities

  • Document a model by adding text descriptions and hyper-links to files and web pages

  • Allow time-varying dependencies in a model

• Graphical Depiction of Models

  • Depict direct linkages between entities

  • Depict indirect linkages between entities

  • Filter results of analysis and other information in order to prioritize risk

• Risk Analysis

  • Perform path algorithms to analyze risk

  • Assess cumulative degree of impact and vulnerability of each entity

  • Present the results of the assessments in charts and reports

RiskOutLook® empowers timely risk assessment and robust risk management . It is the culmination of more than ten years of research and development. Spurred in the autumn of 1998 by the Y2K problem, continuing close association between senior decision makers, domain experts, software developers and mathematical modelers has led to the development of a tool to put risk into perspective.