Opasnet talk:Guidebook specification

Processes and products in risk/impact assessments - some messy and badly organized thoughts -- Mikko Pohjola 17:45, 15 January 2008 (EET)

An assessment can be seen as consisting of the process of making the assessment and the product(s) that are produced by the process. The products are produced according to some needs (use purpose of the product), which defines the intended (desired?) structure (contents, appearance, form, etc.) of the product. The use purpose further defines, or at least sets requirements for, the structure of the process that produces, or is intended to produce, the product (which has the structure that meets the requirements set by the use purpose). In general it can be said that the the purpose of the process is to produce the product, whose purpose furthermore is to initiate (become a part of, fulfill its task within, ...) its use process.

When talking about risk or impact assessments the level of observation is such that the term product refers to the certain kind of description of reality within a certain scope. It is thus a composite information object synthesized of smaller chunks of information. The term process then refers to the (organized?) compilation of activities or events that produce this composite information object. They can be of types such as observation, information collection and synthesis. Furthermore, the term process can also refer to the activities of managing, or organizing, these above-mentioned activities.

The term process object may be used to refer to the structural parts of the process or their composites, including also the whole process. The term product object may be used to refer to the structural parts of the product or their composites, including also the whole product.

The risk/impact assessment product is information. The product and its parts are descriptions of reality, information about the reality. The risk/impact assessment process is producing, collecting and synthesizing information and management of these activities (let us call them sub-processes). The target of information collection and synthesis sub-processes is information about reality, the target of observation is the reality itself. The target of management sub-process is the composite of the other sub-processes. It can also be argued that management is a meta-process of risk/impact assessment process, that observation is a sub-process of risk/impact assessment process, and that only collection and synthesis sub-processes actually belong to the risk/impact assessment process as its internal structural parts. This is merely a boundary definition issue, and in any case it is easy to see that the above-mentioned structural parts of the process are hierarchically related.

Risk/impact assessment is thus (almost?) all about information. It deals with descriptions of phenomena, not directly the phenomena themselves. A variable (a part of the assessment product, a product object) is a description of a part of reality, not the part of reality itself. The process objects, such as editing a particular variable, on the other hand could be argued to be reality itself.

What does this all mean when thinking of risk/impact assessment information systems and their contents? Naturally, information products can be easily captured within such systems, but processes not (directly). It is obvious that the objects that can be stored within an information system are of the type product and that processes can only be built-in indirectly. However, the contents of these product type objects can of course be about either products or processes - descriptions of something.

A guidebook of risk/impact assessment should contain:

• generalized description(s) of the product, and its structural parts, of risk/impact assessment (2nd meta)
• descriptions of the risk/impact assessment process, and its structural parts, that produces such product (2nd meta)

A resource center should contain:

• unorganized or untargeted descriptions of reality (1st meta, result of information collection and/or observation)

A result database should contain:

• organized, targeted descriptions of reality (1st meta, result of information synthesis)

The above-mentioned parts of a risk/impact assessment information system are storages of product type objects. Perhaps, however, for clarity it might be good to reserve the term product only for the result database contents(?).

If we wish a risk/impact assessment information system to not only be a storage of information, but to make it functional, we should to try to build in some processes into it. This can, as mentioned above, only be done indirectly, i.e. by providing support of some kind for carrying out the needed parts of the process. In part the guidebook is intended provide this kind of support, but the system would also require a workspace where the process can be carried out, in part or wholly, and specific tools for information synthesis as required.