7. Meta-methodology for Risk Management

The need for more effective ways to manage risk of technological systems and ensure safety continues to grow in industry. Risk management tends to be considered part of the process of planning technological systems, though not as part of day-to-day operations. However, risk must also be considered with respect to emergent events that require taking action in ways which differ from planned operational procedures. A method is presented for mitigating system failures. Current state-of-the-art methodologies and frameworks have strength as a common language to understand system failures holistically with various stakeholders. On the other hand, there is a shortcoming in quantitative aspects. This is a major obstacle to assess the effectiveness of various measures to mitigate system risk. In order to overcome this shortcoming (i.e., quantitative expression of risk), this chapter express system risk numerically through a coupling and an interaction factors between system configuration elements as well as system failures frequency rate, this three numerical number (i.e. coupling, interaction and frequency) create three dimensional space, and measuring its trajectory through time visualize system risk trends which are the targets to create an effective preventative measures to system failures. A root cause of a system failure is discovered by using a system dynamics technique to a trajectory of a system risk location, and then based upon the root cause, the effective countermeasures are extracted. Lastly this methodology is applied to the system failure cases with various ICT systems, and countermeasures are extracted. An application example of ICT system failures exhibits the effectiveness of this methodology.