Utilizing Risk Management in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Abstract

The goal of this thesis was to identify and assess the maturity of risk management in the client organization and to develop a tangible risk management framework to utilize in the operations. The purpose of the work was to clarify the organization about risk management in general and raise risk management and security awareness within the organization and personnel.

Document review and semi-structured interviews were chosen for the data collection part of the thesis. Document review included some parts of traditional literature review. The process of document review included evaluation and assessment of the documents of the client organization, literature review was implemented as an informal process from basic literature around risk management for enterprises. Semi-structured interviews were executed in the early stages of this thesis and followed a similar framework during the process.

Results from the data collection revealed that the maturity of risk management in the organization were inadequate and required a formalization of a risk management framework to support the organization. The risk management framework constructed is at the basic level and easy to adapt to the operations, the framework walks through a logical path for the author to follow through the risk management process.

It was concluded that this thesis met the requirements set in the early stages and gave the organization a tangible risk management framework to be adapted to the operations and allows developing it according to the needs and decisions made by the organization.

Keywords: risk, risk management, SME