Multi-Stakeholder Risk Assessment of Socio-Technical Interventions

When organisations sponsor interventions into economic and social systems, it is normal for them to conduct an evaluation of the risks that the intervention entails. Conventional, standardised approaches to Risk Assessment are heavily committed to the perspective of the sponsoring organisation. The interests of other stakeholders may be considered, at least to the extent that they are perceived as representing constraints on the achievability of the sponsor's objectives. This narrows the focus to only those stakeholders that are perceived to have sufficient power, and overlooks legitimate stakeholders. Many interventions have substantial impacts, variously by design, and in the form of side-effects and collateral damage. Most interventions embody application of information technologies, and the technologies that are being deployed now extend beyond data processing, into automated inferencing from data, automated decision-making, and automated action. Further concerns arise from the increasing opaqueness inherent in many technologies, whereby inferencing is fuzzy, decision-making is empirically-based and hence a-rational, actions are unexplainable and unauditable, redress is unachievable, and accountability is destroyed. This article seeks a practicable mechanism whereby the interests of relevant players can be reflected in the assessment of interventions. Given that Risk Assessment (RA) is mainstream within organisations, the article investigates how RA can be augmented, with the intention of leveraging that familiarity and easing the absorption of external perspectives into each organisation's internal evaluations. The proposed Multi-Stakeholder Risk Assessment (MSRA) technique is described, exemplars of processes with some of the technique's characteristics are identified, and an illustrative case study is used to demonstrate its potential efficacy.