People Based Risk

This page discusses how people can pose a risk to the knowledge resource.

People contribute to knowledge risks in two main ways.

People individually represent a risk because they hold and apply knowledge required by an organisation and because they acquire and consolidate knowledge over a finite time period before they eventually take the knowledge they hold away from an organisation. People who hold more knowledge might represent a higher risk for an organisation because the risk of losing a lot of knowledge in one event is higher. People who are likely to leave an organisation sooner and take knowledge away with them also pose a higher risk to an organisation than people who are likely to remain with the organisation for a long time.

People collectively represent a risk to specific knowledge elements within a knowledge resource because of the requirements of the specific knowledge within an organisational context. Organisations are interested in knowledge because it is the application of knowledge which allows the organisation to function. Each knowledge element of interest to an application area will have human experts or capable people associated with it. The application demand of the organisation and the application capacity of an individual person cause some organisations and some knowledge areas to need more than one human being associated with them. The number of human beings required by a specific organisation for a particular knowledge item is dependent on these factors.

Analysis of the risk posed by people to the knowledge resource is based on a requirement for at least three people to hold the knowledge and also based on the remaining time that this knowledge provision is available. Clearly organisations might need many more than three people; however this analysis is based on general requirements in order to create a workable risk based analysis.