We have started work on a long list of  new features and enhancements to our governance software suite: BPC RiskManager, and, assuming the world doesn’t come to an end this year, we think you are going to like what is coming – but more on that in future posts. 

Our four main service lines -  Software Sales,  Custom Software,  Survey Hosting and Consulting have opened the year with the strongest bookings in a number of years so 2012 looks like it will be an interesting and busy year.  The Custom Software and Consulting teams are now fully committed for the first quarter (obviously sales and hosting don’t have capacity limits) , which is a good way to start the new year.  

2011 was a great year at BPC, and we thank you, our clients and friends for your on going dedication and support – without you we don’t exist.  To our clients, while we don’t get to see many of you personally, our regular telephone conversations and email communications make us feel we know each of you as friends.  We couldn’t ask for a better bunch of clients – loyal, considerate, helpful cooperative, inspirational and fun.   A simple “thank you” just doesn’t seem enough.

 For BPC RiskManager V6 users there has recently been a major update released with lots of new features and a couple of progressive updates since then, so for those with current maintenance subscriptions, make sure you contact us and get the update, and those of you without, make sure you get yourself current and we’ll get you the update.

There are three main reporting systems in RM – the inbuilt reports (these can not be expanded), the end-user reports (BPC RM ReportBuilder), and mail-merge/office template  style reporting.  Of these, the primary reporting tool for end user reporting is the BPC RiskManager ReportBuilder reporting engine.   

So how do you make these tables and views available to the BPC Risk Manager  end user report development tool (report builder) so that you can report on them in your own reports?  Fortunately BPC RiskManager allows you to add these things directly in the BPC RiskManager client to the reporting engine so you can include them in your reports.

By way of an example, we will add the  actions progress table to the end user reporting layer and hook it in to the magic-query maker, so that when you use the table in your reports it automatically hooks it to the appropriate master table or view (in this case “search_risk_actions”).  We are adding a raw table, rather than a view, so we will add the word “raw” to the name so that we distinguish it from the views.  The difference between the tables and the views is that the views populate the table’s look-up fields with the description field of the look up table.

In the RM client, on the Administration tab:

1. Go to Administration/Report Builder/Table Names
2. Select “New”
3. Enter in the fields:

• Table_name: RISK_ACTION_PROGRESS
• Table alias: Action Progress Raw

(Note the spaces in the above)

1. Select save.
2. Got to Administration/Report Builder/Field Names
3. Select “Add Fields”
4. In the pop-up box enter: RISK_ACTION_PROGRESS
5. Select “Ok” – this will add the field names.
6. Got to Administration/Report Builder/Table Joins
7. Select “New”
8. Enter in the fields:

• Table_name1: SEARCH_RISK_ACTIONS
• Table_name2: RISK_ACTION_PROGRESS
• Join_Type: dajtLeftOuter
• Field_names1: Action ID
• Operators: =
• Field_name2: ACTION_ID

NOTE the space in the Field_names1 “Action ID”

1. Select “Save”
2. Close the administration window.

The risk_action_progress table and its fields will now be available to Report Builder.

BPC RiskManager V6.2.5.25 – BETA14 has been released.  This version mandates the V6.2.6 database.  BETA15 is a production ready release.    The V6.2.6 database is transitional, in that the BETA cycle will see us move to at least V6.2.7 before it is finished.  

Clients who have upgraded their databases to the V6.2.6 can install this release directly.

Included in this release:

RiskManager Client

• Flow Chart Designer hooks have been expanded and you can now invoked the designer directly from the risk maintenance screen.  Flow charts are linked to the business processes and business sub-processes, among other things.
• New integrated work flow support for flowcharts and expanded scripting RM/Work flow interface.   This is a substantial internal update.  Workforce diagramming is now directly supported from process and sub process definition screens rather than as a separate engine.  Work flows diagrams can be executed and are scriptable with interfacing calls that can invoke screens in RM.  The internal update lays the framework for a substantial expansion in the role of Work flow and flowcharting.
• Surfacing of most of the remaining risk attributes to the Windows desktop client including financial data, additional audit fields for planning and documents.  These includes estimates for loss (or gain).
• Significant expansion in the ability to selectively hide functionality.
• Addition of various features to the insurance centre as part of the introduction of claims support.

(Note: The new claims screens are now scheduled for BETA 15.)

RiskManager App Server

• Updated Bulk Importer with support for:
  • data value transformation and mapping,
  • push feed to the survey engine allowing auto-submission of scanned survey data
  • improved table selectors

RM SurveyManager

• Ongoing expansion of survey structure capabilities.  A number of additions have been made to the SM engine to support risk register rating via survey.  This is an ongoing upgrade and will continue progressively for a few more releases.  This first group of enhancements adds additional tags to better enable risk register style surveys. 

Please Note: 

BETA releases are intended for deployment by clients the same as full version releases.  Deployment usually involves replacing a few files by copying.  The BETA tag refers to the release packaging that does not usually include an auto-installer, auto-upgrader (other than for the desktop client) and that the take up is of the BETA is optional.  This means that a client can take the latest beta without having taken any previous Beta’s and we will guarantee to provide a customised DB upgrade.  Support is only promised for the latest BETA and the previous full release.  Clients using older BETA’s may be required to upgrade to the current BETA before support is provided.  The BETA release stream is also a way for us to extend the life of client subscriptions on version linked licenses. 

Documentation Updates

Go and look at the riskwiki  for documentation updates.  We have been busy adding new papers under a number of headings including new discussions of the community “network stakeholder model” and survey manager and risk manager user manuals.

The V6.2.6 DB changes have actually been creeping into the DB scripts progressively across the BETA’s but the server and client have not used most of the V6.2.6 changes (or at least not required them) until this release.  We normally feed the major DB changes into the DB structure up to 12 months in advance of  utilising them in a client.  Only when the feature is required in production do we clock over the DB Version number.  (There is actually one DB feature that has been in the system since approximately 1998 that is still waiting to get to the top of the to-do list,  and in that case the code to use the feature is already written, tested and has been utilised in other production applications, but the anticipated requirement has simply not yet surfaced in the market place.) 

In V6.2.5.22  includes:

• Updated - Insurance policy management.  Intended for “Insureds” (holders of insurance policies) rather than insurers (issuers) or insurors (agents).  Insurance policy management holds details such as contacts, coverage, exclusions, history, financial data, and renewal information.  Each Insurance policy can be tied to a type of control which in turn can template, classify and optionally standardise strategies and controls applied to governance matters such as risks, compliance obligations, CR risks, and other governance obligations.  Insurance policies also link to incidents and governance matters (risks, etc.) via claims management.   This release sees the surfacing of additional data fields, new report views and connection of the insurance renewal reminder and review systems to the messaging system.
• Upgraded Email Messaging.  More internally tracked responsibilities have now been added as uniquely managed messages to the mail & message queueing system.  This is available regardless of whether or not you enable email dispatch through the BPC MailManager.  (IE. the messaging system and email tracking works regardless of whether the emails are actually being sent . )  Among the additions are document, section and insurance renewals.
• New - Risk Milestones.  A milestone is restorable a snapshot of a risk.  Milestones existed in BPC RiskManager from version 1, but with the move from Version 5 to 6 the milestones were dropped in favour of a much more expanded continuous audit logging system with dedicated search, a much expanded assessment tracking and management system and the existing restorable archives.   These facilities did most of what milestones did and provided a much wider range of additional capabilities for search, multiple concurrent users assessing risk,  and data extraction.  There were some things that the logging system, et al did not satisfy however, and that includes a simple way to deliver a chart showing risks at an instance in time, or run multiple “what if” analyses (and store the results in a restorable way, and returning to the official values).   So Milestones are back and improved, with milestone types, descriptions, dates, etc, and charts.   There will be lots more happening here over the coming months.
• New Milestone Charts – Track changes in I/C/R ratings over multiple years, etc.
• New Profile Chart – expands the display of assessments against I/R ratings to the current + 2 assessments allowing either 3 time based assessments or current self/reviewer, previous self/reviewer  and previous-previous self/reviewer assessments simultaneously.
• New Email Message Template reports.
• New Auto-Add feature for the Report Builder interfacing engine so that risk-system-administrator-end-users can add custom or rarely used views and tables to the reporting engine reportable data.  If you know the name of the table or view this feature will mine it and build a definition for ReportBuilder  (Report builder is packaged into every client).  Now nothing is hidden!
• New Views for assertion reporting, number capture, etc.
• Updated BPC RiskMailManager (Email message batching) to accommodate the new mail queues in this version.

BETA12 is on the client download site (you will need your username and password), but if applying the BETA12 patch we STRONGLY  advise you to contact us so that we can assist with the DB conversion.   There are a couple of messy changes to tables that are mirrored or version tracked and some new FK constraints that may require more personalised attention depending on your data.  

 Those preferring to skip the BETA’s and wait for the full installer that is shipped with the official release, should be looking about 1 to 2 month’s out from now.

The next BETA release – due end of next week – will include a big update to claims processing and the compliance obligations.

With BETA11 we have finally decided to commit to the new data structure that has been waiting in the wings for about 8 months.  We continued with the BETA stream on the old 6.2.5 DB structure as long as we could, but now it is hampering our ability to move to the next generation of the RM system.

BETA11 actually uses Release 1. of the new V6.2.6 DB structure and will NOT work with the V6.2.5 Database entirely.  The client and server have been designed to accept the V6.2.5 data structure and apply some intelligent field and table selections based on the differences between the data structures but the client will generate several “non-critical” error warning messages on start up as it attempts to access tables that do not exist in the V6.2.5 data structure.   Obviously, this is not appropriate for production installs. 

The BETA11 structure includes a number of revisions to the data layouts to remove some organisational unnecessary restrictions that in some cases date back over 10 years and surface a raft of new insurance, claims, incident and compliance capabilities.  We are currently working closely with a number of clients feeding requirements for their real-world compliance, claims and OHS operational needs and the V6.2.6 DB structure is intended to meet the architectural requirements of these clients. 

This has been a large project commencing over 12 months ago with just a couple of clients, and over the intervening period has expanded substantially as many more of you have joined the BETA team to provide your own version of these related needs.

BETA11 is a production stable release BUT, for production your DB must be upgraded to the V6.2.6 structure.  We have not built an auto-installer for BETA11 (see below for the reason for this decision), and so if you wish to use it in production you should email me and we will make it available for direct download on your client login page.  In each case we will build a custom upgrade script against our copy of your reference database, or (preferably) we will hand upgrade your database, but you will need to make a backup of your current production database for the  purpose.   For a custom upgrade script against a reference database there will be a small fee.  For a upgrade performed by us against a backup of your production database forwarded to us there will be NO fee.  (The custom script takes a lot longer  to make and is more error prone than if you provide us with a backup of your production database and we run a delta analysis between it and our master reference databases using our tools on our hardware and then provide the upgraded DB back to you – so we are clearly trying to encourage you to do the latter).

The issues are that:

•  the 6.2.6 DB involves some fairly tricky table structure changes to foreign key and version table structures that are very hard to automate outside of the installer package and the installers take about 5 hours to build.  
• the 6.2.6 DB structure is being changed in 3 steps (Release 1 is available now) because we are adding some features that are being designed on-the-fly with a number of clients who want to be able to try some ideas and then enhance and expand the ideas so there are more parts coming over the next two to three weeks.
• there are significant developments occurring on multiple fronts at once which should complete over the next month, so the significant cost in building the installers with automated DB version upgrades is better delayed until there is more stability in the DB structure

Having said that, a conversion to the 6.2.6 structure NOW is safe to do because future changes will be minor enhancements rather than the fundamental re-organisation of a number of tables that the 6.2.5 to 6.2.6 change represents. 

So what should you do?  If you really want to be part of the compliance-insurance-claims-OHS BETA stream – do the change.  If you are happy to use the facilities as we design and build them, then wait until the stable build with the automated installer is released.

What is in BETA11 ?

• Insurance has been moved from being a relatively hidden feature of strategy – control and type-of-control design to front and centre of a new Insurance panel.
• Claims management has been added
• Incidents have been moved from being only a slave table of Risk to being handled independent of risks and able to be linked back to multiple risks (and claims and insurance, etc).
• Legal management has been added to allow for the tracking of legal resources associated with a claim.
• Fixes to screen handling in documents to ensure the document and section master lists are refreshed when documents and sections are added
•  New default inherent likelihood rating level can be set for new unrated topics
• The bubble chart now allows the minimum bubble size to be set so they can be stopped from shrinking to a single pixel when most risks/compliance items are in a single bubble.
• “My Responsibility” summary now accounts for delegated responsibilities.  (Under the cover the responsibility summariser has been hugely expanded to cover all responsibilities in the database so you will soon see a substantially expanded responsibility tracking screen in “My RiskManager” that covers everything for which you have any responsibility).
• A large number of new rules capabilities have been added to the surveymanager engine and enhancements to the JavaScript library.   There is more happening on this front as we progressively expand the direct SurveyManager to RiskManager cross table access.  Our aim on this front is to eliminate the need for the intervening results table to interface the survey engine screens with the RiskManager tables.

Beta 12 will be released this week – look to Friday.  It will mainly be a refinement of the things in Beta11 and expansion (hopefully completion) of the claims management capabilities.  Beta11 is not available as a browser plug-in-client (only in desktop download).

The tutorials are at:

BPC SurveyManager Tutorials

 We will be adding more as time permits.

The illustrated list of input controls is at http://riskwiki.bishopphillips.com/index.php?title=BPC_SurveyManager_-_Questions_and_Input_Controls

Among the new features recently added to the BPC SurveyManager libraries is a new password protected portal mode, so you can  now selectively surface surveys in each organisation to a simple portal without writing a portal survey of your own.   We have added more capabilities to the auto publish functions so that you can have anonymous responders for any survey by setting a flag, and impose login requirements per survey without adding user login questions at the start.

The portal mode will be particularly useful to teachers running classed based surveys, because you can now use the portal on a class wide basis in a school based computer for all students to concurrently access a class based survey without you having to publish to them first or send invitations.

There is lots more coming to survey manager over the next few weeks so keep tuned.   Among the changes coming to the SM library is a significant expansion of Survey Manager’s ability to directly interrogate and update risk, insurance claims and incident tables for those using BPC SurveyManager as part of their BPC RiskManager application suite.

The BPC SurveyManager Maintenance WebClient is getting some new features to expand the range of surveys that can be built with it.  We have kept it artificially simplified now for a number of years as it was always intended to be an entry point solution, but the increasingly complex surveys some of the heavier survey manager clients wish to create mean that we really must make more of the survey engines huge range of capabilities available in the web client.   We have recently completed an analysis of the types of clients using our survey technologies heavilly, and those of you making the heaviest and best use of the tech are also those attempting the most complex of surveys.  

The current web client just does not do the underlying survey engine justice and we feel it is time to really let it stretch its legs.   We will try and keep the over-all feeling of simplicity the same, and in fact some things will seem to get simpler because the current release tries makes some things just too mindless by doing a whole lot for you in the background.

Even so, we are told, our web client is still way more powerful than most similar survey clients, but if you like the current one, just wait for the enhancements coming.

Oh, and don’t forget, that we host surveys on our servers, so you can contract us to manage your survey needs on your behalf.  The service includes your own database, the survey engine, emailing invitations, the portal, at least daily backups, 24 hour monitoring, responder assistance, maintenance of the data and content and even assistance with creation of surveys.  All clients are encouraged to try out this extremely economical service as an alternative to doing it yourself.  The distributed nature of BPC SurveyManager means you can exchange surveys and data with our servers to feed back into your risk systems, for example (or just point your survey manager or risk manager clients at our servers in addition to using the web client).

In this release:

RM Server

• AD Active Directory Authentication with Groups – AD LDAP and WinNT authentication is now supported in AD.  WinNT is faster and supports groups, while LDAP is account lockout “safe”  but may not be able to check group membership. 
• AD Active Directory Authentication account lockout on bad password bug fixed.  Under the WinNT where max retries are set on account logins in AD, the user will be locked out if an incorrect password is supplied.  In this case you can use the AD LDAP provider. Groups may or may not be available (use the test program to find out), depending on how the AD access rights are defined.
• AD Active Directory Authentication now accepts OPTIONAL canonical strings for DC filters.
• AD Active Directory Authentication now accepts a flag to select LDAP/WinNT ADSI providers.
• RM Beta8 Bug fix:  Strategies can now be deleted again.

RM Client

• RM Significant speed up in risk, compliance and topic solver screens on risk scrolling.
• RM Risk calculations now update the summary assertion group for each risk
• RM Risk calculations now update and display audit ratings separately from self and reviewer risk ratings
• RM Risk Audit ratings can now have form edit and reading visibility defined.
• RM Risk Audit assessments now display in a dedicated rating level and can be edited in multiple locations.
• DM Refresh of browser list after detailed document record changes fixed.  (Auto-Refresh after document record insert is not yet available. You will have to use reload until then).

BPC RiskManager V6.2.5.18 – BETA8  Desktop client installer has been uploaded to the download site for those clients that need a desktop installer for internal distribiution on local networks. 

The file you need is :

BPCRiskManagerEnrimaV625_18Client_Setup.zip

You will need to unpack this and deploy the enclosed exe to whichever location/solution you are using to push desktop installers onto remote desktops.  The enclosed exe is a signed windows installer.  It should be recognised as an upgrade to any existing Build 14 install, but you can also uninstall the wny existing desktop and run this install as a fresh install as well.  Nothing will be lost on the desktop.

Clients patching full single user installations on desktops will need both this zip and the BETA8 zip to fully patch their desktops, although only the enterprise BETA8 zip is actually required to actually use the single user install.  

The patch in this update contains ONLY the desktop client for use where users do not have a full single user install on their desktops.  While you CAN install the client portion of the single user app with installer in this blog post, the result will mean that the desktop can talk to the remote server, but not the local server, until the server is also updated (from the BETA 8 zip).

There are no new capabilities in this update.  If you need an activeX version of this client build let us know and we will generate it, otherwise we might let it wait until BETA9.

Use your client credentials to login and download as usual.

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.

It is an ongoing debate internally how much of the compliance support should be delivered through survey manager (which in theory could do most of it) and how much through the RiskManager client.  So far we are essentially doing both – we are adding features and tags to the SurveyManager library to support compliance tables for those that will decide to run with a heavy compliance survey focus and adding the all the compliance capabilities to the main RiskManager client.  So it is taking longer than we would like.

The other major project is a detailed documentation of the bowels of the SurveyManager engine and posting of the same on the riskwiki, so you may have noticed that there are lots of changes happening there as we progressively document the huge tag and property lists directly from the code base.  This is also seeing a cleanup of some of the SurveyManager code, and inevitably addition of even more features.

The new SurveyManager library has been deployed into our live servers so those undertaking surveys are actually using the updated system.  We have not yet deployed it to off site clients, but will include it in the next Beta release.

We hope to have a Beta7 out before Christmas… so watch this space.