Risk Scoring Systems—An Interview with Tom Doyle — V2N1

Risk scoring systems

In this episode, your host, Doug Nix, inter­views Tom Doyle of Indus­tri­al Safe­ty Inte­gra­tion, a Cana­di­an com­pa­ny offer­ing risk assess­ment soft­ware to help prac­ti­tion­ers bet­ter struc­ture their risk assess­ments and pro­duce reports for oth­er safe­ty engi­neer­ing and reg­u­la­to­ry com­pli­ance requirements.

Note: Sad­ly, Indus­tri­al Safe­ty Inte­gra­tion is no longer in business.

Transcript

One of the key tools in car­ry­ing out a risk assess­ment is the risk scor­ing sys­tem used. There are lots of risk-scor­ing sys­tems out there, so how do you choose one for your project? What about risk assess­ment and risk man­age­ment soft­ware sys­tems? Tom Doyle, Pres­i­dent of Indus­tri­al Safe­ty Inte­gra­tion, joins Doug to dis­cuss these impor­tant issues.

The pri­ma­ry tool used in risk assess­ment is the risk scor­ing sys­tem. These sys­tems range in com­plex­i­ty from sim­ple, two-vari­able meth­ods that con­sid­er only sever­i­ty and aggre­gate prob­a­bil­i­ty to much more sophis­ti­cat­ed sys­tems with four or more vari­ables. Scal­ing is also wide­ly vari­able, with as few as two choic­es to as many fif­teen choic­es for each vari­able. Some pure­ly math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els use prob­a­bil­i­ty cal­cu­la­tions to deter­mine risk lev­els. How do you choose a sys­tem? How fine do the scales need to be to give you results that make sense?

Tom Doyle, Pres­i­dent of Indus­tri­al Safe­ty Inte­gra­tion, a Cana­di­an man­u­fac­tur­er of Risk Man­age­ment soft­ware, joins Doug to dis­cuss these issues. 

Send your com­ments and ques­tions to Doug Nix.

In our next episode, we’ll delve deep­er into Haz­ard Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, the first step in risk analysis.