Advanced Risk Assessments in the Risk Workspace

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Advanced Risk Assessments in the Risk Workspace

    The Risk Workspace in ServiceNow provides an enhanced, user-friendly environment for conducting Advanced Risk Assessments. It streamlines access by allowing users to quickly find risk assessments assigned to them or their group through the GRC Risk Portal or directly from the Risk Workspace. This workspace improves the assessment experience by presenting more relevant data and intuitive navigation, helping operational risk managers effectively evaluate risks using selected methodologies.

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    Key Features

    • Risk Assessment Methodology Filter: On the Home page, users can filter assessments by methodology, such as operational risk assessments, to focus on relevant risks.
    • Contextual Side Panel: Offers explanations and training content about assessment sections. This panel is configurable to include custom training materials and can be closed if not needed.
    • Risk Assessment Home Page Display: Shows essential details at a glance including the entity under assessment, due date, assigned person, approver, risk description, assessment results, and risk response strategies.
    • Reference Information Access: The side panel provides clickable graphical representations with detailed insights into associated risks and controls, including:
      • Risk events graph showing gross and net loss forecasts.
      • Quarterly key indicator breach percentages.
      • Control indicator failure statistics and control test results.
      • Open issues with severity levels, with the ability to create new issues directly.
    • Factor Guidance: Users can quickly view guidance on risk factors via an icon, streamlining the response process.
    • Reassignment Capability: Risk assessments can be reassigned to other users from the home page. When multiple users share the same name, email addresses are displayed to prevent misassignment.
    • Factor Weighting Information: First line risk assessors can view qualitative weight, qualitative scores, and quantitative scores for each factor by selecting the Overall rating option.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    ServiceNow customers leveraging the Risk Workspace for Advanced Risk Assessments gain an efficient, consolidated view of risk data and assessment context. This enables faster, more accurate risk evaluations and informed decision-making. The ability to access detailed reference data and guidance within the workspace minimizes the need to switch contexts or look up information elsewhere. Reassignment and clear user identification features reduce errors in workflow management. Overall, the workspace enhances operational risk management by making assessments more transparent, collaborative, and data-driven.

    The Risk Workspace offers an enhanced and a simplified user experience for users to perform Advanced Risk Assessments. You can quickly access the risk assessments assigned to you or your group from the GRC Risk Portal or the Risk Workspace.

    With the new Risk Workspace, your risk assessments are more intuitive with more data readily available for you to refer for every assessment that you perform in the risk assessment instance. As an operational risk manager, when you use Advanced Risk Assessments, on the Home page, in the Risk Summary field,you have a filter available to select your risk assessment methodology. For example, you can select the risk assessment methodology that shows you the operational risks assessed. For more information on risk assessment methodologies, see Advanced Risk Assessment.

    For a new user to understand risk assessments, a Contextual side panel is provided with an explanation about the assessment sections. While a default explanation and a brief training are provided, you can also configure the system to show your training content related to risk assessments. If you do not want to keep the side panel training information open, you can also close it using the information icon.

    At a glance, the risk assessment home page shows you the entity being assessed, the due date for the assessment, the person the assessment is assigned to, the approver, and the risk description. The home page also shows the results of the risk assessment and the selected risk response strategies.
    Figure 1. Risk assessment home page
    Risk assessment home page

    Some of the major enhancements for Advanced Risk Assessments in the Risk Workspace are as follows:

    View reference information for associated risks and controls

    The Contextual side panel shows the reference information for associated risks and controls. The graphical representations can be clicked to get detailed information about the risk events, issues, indicator breaches and so on. The reference information shows the following:
    • Risk events graph that displays the gross loss and the net loss of the aggregated risk events for that particular risk. This graph also displays the forecasts of the losses.
    • Percentage of key indicator breaches for every quarter.
    • Percentage of control indicator failure graph. When performing a control assessment, you can refer to the control test results, indicator failures, and so on
    • Number of open issues with their severity. You can also create issues by clicking the plus icon.
    Figure 2. Reference information for Advanced Risk Assessment
    Additional information for Advanced Risk Assessment.

    View factor guidance

    In the workspace, while responding to factors, you can quickly view the guidance by clicking the Show guidance icon Show guidance.. This ability saves your time as you can view the guidance and understand the factor while responding.

    Reassign assessments

    If you are assigned a risk assessment that must be assessed by another user, you can reassign the assessment from the risk assessment home page. In case there are two users with the same name, you have the ability to view their email addresses while reassigning the assessment. This ability prevents users from assigning the assessment to the wrong users.

    View factor weighting information

    As a first line risk assessor, you may need to view the qualitative weight, the qualitative score, and the quantitative score of a factor. You can easily access this information by clicking Overall rating.