An Assessment of Risk Management Strategies for Financial Information Systems by Financial Institutions in Kenya

Decision making is an important aspect of software processes management. Most organizations allocate resources based on predictions. Improving the accuracy of such predictions reduces costs and helps in efficient resources management. risk management is of vital importance for any financial institution (and enterprise for that matter) to keep its information systems secure at an acceptable level, the key issues focus on both how to reduce the probability of risk occurrence and decrease the loss of risk consequence. The main tasks for the implementation of such requirements involve the determination of the causes of risks, the estimation of risk occurrence probability, and the evaluation of risk consequence severity, which are all included in the risk analysis. In the process of risk analysis for information systems, models are built in order to analyze and better understand the risk factors and their causal relationships in real-world information systems. Establishing an appropriate model suitable for the target risk problem is a crucial task that will ultimately influence the effectiveness of risk analysis results. In the existing literature, most the approaches either assumed that the structure of the model was provided by domain expert experience and knowledge, or assumed that the structure was chosen from some general well-known class of model structures, thus, the results of risk analysis were relatively subjective. To overcome these drawbacks, not only expert have the experience and knowledge that needs to be taken into account, but also, the database of observed cases from information systems should be utilized in the process of modeling. With the growth of the dependency on IT, the impact of risk concerns on the development and exploitation of information systems has also increased exponentially. The risk management system focuses on specific phases of the software life cycle, without recognizing that risks in one stage can have an impact on other stages. This paper explores the risk situation as it is in the financial institutions in Kenya and suggests ways through which risk management can be brought a notch higher in order to minimise the losses incurred when faced by these risk situations.