BPC RiskManager V6.2.5.17 – BETA7 : Released
BPC RiskManager V6.2.5.17 – BETA7 has been released to the download site for free download for clients with CURRENT maintenance agreements. Connect to the web site using your BPC Client Web Site login credentials (email me if you have forgotten your login details).
We received an excellent specification from one of our clients – MFS – for a ‘Topic Based” view of compliance to augment the risk of non-compliance concept supported in the earlier BETA’s and we have integrated that concept into this release of Beta7.
There are some new charts, report views and export capabilities to be brought into the system yet to complement the assertion views of risk so expect BETA7 to be rapidly replaced by BETA8
In this release:
1. Main Features Added
- Document Management
- Topic View and Topic Solver
- Publishing Authorities
- Current and Residual Bubble Charts and Expanded MS Word export
2. Detail
- Vastly improved flow of control in Compliance Unit.
- New custom screen architecture to allow inclusion of user customised data entry and access views and other optional screens. The MFS Topic Solver is the first such example.
- New configurable MFS Risk/Compliance Topic Solver Sub-system.
- New Document management with sections module. A Document+Section can be linked to each risk, and compliance questions/assertion tested against the documents. The document management centre and finder support views of risks by document list, document, section list and section, with word export and drill through to risk details from the document centre.
- New Current and residual risk bubble charts with controls ratings views
- Revised chart screen presentation
- Revised and improved MS Word export from Chart screen.
- Associated new Administration and Setup-Profiles configuration screens.
- SurveyManager – New data entry modes and markup tags added
- SurveyManager – New anonymous and on-demand survey publishing support
- SurveyManager – Potentially annoying bug due to bug tracking system dependencies removed.
- Bug Tracking – The “Phone Home” behaviour of the RM bug tracking system has been changed to write a local log instead. The phone home system was good where client networks allowed the message through (as some of you discovered when we phone you to tell you there was something wrong with your server, but too unreliable for general use due to the few clients allowing the transmissions. We have therefore replaced it with a log file, in the temporary files directory so we can at least get the log data if needed. It is only written in the event of a critical system issue.
In this BETA our latest thinking on how a whole of organisation/government governance system should work starts to become clear. The unique twist is that we are using the risk record to store risks, compliance obligations and compliance obligation events. So every risk record contains all the information necessary for it to be a compliance record, and vice versa. Thus every risk has a compliance view and every compliance issue has a risk view – and you can enter data into either view at the same time. With the addition of documents and sections (for legislation, policy & procedure references, etc) each of which has at least one person responsible for it, you can also see all the compliance obligations + the calculated risk of the obligation breaches by document/section. Combining this with the already existing other of ways of structuring risks (folders, master-child trees, documents, people, complex searches, etc) you can navigate and summarise the risk/compliance landscape from different angles and using differing ratings and tie it all back to the corporate plan.
Every risk or compliance item can have an indefinite number of groups of assertions/questions linked to it so differing teams can apply multiple and differing checklists and evaluation criteria to the same issue. In this mode, risk-causes become factors explaining a less than optimal question response adding a layer of structure to a risks usually flat causes list, and each cause/contributing factor can have its own list of strategies / controls to manage / respond to it. Thus the risk’s flat strategy list becomes structured by the causes of the risk. Given that all this can be linked to a document and a section within that document (and the document and section have their own activation and update control responsibilities and tracking) you now have an additional set of ways to slice the risk/compliance data.
There is quite a bit more coming in this area as we surface the new corporate planning, compliance obligations, financial elements, and performance management modules progressively over coming releases. There are a number of other components in the wings. You may noticed the FlowCharting module with its script engine already in your client that has been there for sometime. Apart from allowing you to draw and execute scripted multi-user flowcharts, the module is also intended to connect to hooks sewn through your database. It has been waiting for the some of the other parts of the system to catch up, and you should soon see new flowchart views hooking the various objects like risks, obligations, strategies, etc together.
