Comprehensive and Scientifically Meaningful Risk Assessment

In order for a risk assessment methodology to be comprehensive, in must address all relevant objectives of an organization to which losses would occur from one or more risk events. This includes estimating the importance of organizational objectives, which is subjective and dependent on judgments from top management as well as others throughout the organization.

In order for a risk assessment methodology to be mathematically/scientifically meaningful, measures/estimates of likelihoods and impacts must be ratio scale. Ordinal measures, such as 1 to 5 scales produce meaningless measures of risk that can result in decisions that are worse than having no measures at all.