Abstract IS managers are faced with many different risks such as project, capability, financial, and maintainability risks, caused by a variety of technical, organizational, and environmental factors. We found that senior IS managers in several diverse organizations focus primarily on managing organizational contributors to risk, in particular instituting various change management strategies to manage functionality and systems integration risk. Managers today are concerned about the financial risk resulting from lack of technical procedures to justify IS investments. As organizations become increasingly reliant on their information systems for critical functions and the complexity of these systems increases with new technology, the number of different risks and the degree of risk grow substantially. Once a system is developed, the IS manager is faced with capability risk , risk that the system does not provide necessary functionality or reliability, meet performance needs, or integrate with other systems and processes.
Financial risk is the inability to achieve an adequate return on investment.
External threats to security and property are also a concern. Finally, systems may suffer from maintainability risk , lacking the capabilities to be fixed or adapted to new environments or technology. This provided an understanding of those causes of risk that currently can be effectively managed as well as those that are still problematic for IS managers. We found that technical risk management tools have been most widely developed and implemented. While there are a number of risk management techniques for managing intra-organizational causes of risk, we expect that senior IS managers still focus most of their efforts on the management of these contributors to risk.