SAS Risk Governance and a Customizable User Experience

The purpose of this blog is to introduce the concept of risk governance and discuss the versatility of the SAS Risk Governance Framework. First, what is risk governance? Risk governance is a term used to describe the rules, conventions, processes, and mechanisms by which decisions about risks are taken and implemented. It is inevitable that institutions experience risk (whether planned or unplanned) as a result of their business processes, and with effective risk governance, organizations can benefit from the changes that risk can bring while minimizing the negative consequences.

In a world where technology is advancing faster than we can imagine, organizations will grow from it but also face many vulnerabilities and risks. This can make risk governance a difficult process for a business. To help navigate the complicated process of risk governance, SAS offers various solutions through the SAS Risk Governance Framework.

SAS Risk Governance Framework through SAS Risk Stratum

SAS Risk Stratum is an integrated risk management platform on which several SAS Risk solutions are deployed. A user will most likely interact with SAS Risk Governance Framework as a part of a SAS Stratum installation. SAS Risk Governance Framework, a key Stratum product, is a user-friendly, web-based infrastructure framework that supports the creation and use of various risk governance solutions. With this framework, users can collect, manage, store, and report risk-related information as well as easily integrate it with other risk solutions. SAS Risk Stratum utilizes SAS Risk Governance Framework as the foundation for its user interface (UI).

One of the goals of SAS Risk Governance Framework is to provide the ultimate user experience, which includes the ability to modify and customize the UI. The UI can be modified in multiple ways ranging from editing web page forms, to adding new custom objects (i.e. new fields, new capabilities, new workflows, etc.), to modifying the main navigation menu, and to including new localization text.

Screen Definition Files

One way the user can customize the SAS Risk Stratum UI is using the SAS Risk Governance Framework to modify and activate screen definition files. Screen definition files are XML files that contain programming statements (in XML syntax) which control how the UI is displayed and how the user can interact with it.

Some elements included in screen definition files are fields (simple data structures such as strings, numbers, dates, etc.), components (i.e. tables, spreadsheets, workflow diagrams which enable presentation of large data structures), and functions (to make calculations, to call data, to clean incoming data, etc.) that are written in Groovy, a programming language based on Java. The user can use existing functions or create new ones. To learn more about these features, the user can visit the Documentation tab on the Administration page in SAS Risk Governance Framework.

Editing Screen Definitions

As mentioned above, the user can edit screen definitions as a way to customize the UI. SAS Risk Governance Framework has three options for editing screen definitions:

Click the Edit Screen Definitions icon (see arrow A in the screen capture below), edit the file directly in the UI, and then save it.
Select a screen definition from the Screen Definitions tab (see arrow B in the screen capture below) on the Administration page, edit the file directly in the UI, and then save it.
Download the screen definitions, edit the files locally with a text editor or with an XML editor, and then upload the edited file.

Select any image to see a larger version.
Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.

XML Rules

When modifying screen definitions, it is useful to note a few basic rules for XML syntax:

All XML elements must have an opening and closing tag.

All XML elements must be properly nested.

All XML documents must have a root element.

All XML element attributes must be quoted “ “.

The following screen capture illustrates the basic tree structure of XML syntax.

At the top of every screen definition file, there is a root element, <ui-definition>. This top-level element describes the screens. Child elements to the root element usually include a <title> element and a <screen> element. The <screen> element describes the appearance and behavior of a single screen, and the <title> element describes the title that appears on the Administration page. The <screen> element can have several child elements. These include <field> and <section> elements, and an optional <initialize> element. The <initialize> element contains code that is executed before a screen appears, <field> describes a prompt for user input, and <section> describes the appearance of a section of elements including <column>, and so on.

To Learn More

As we can see, the UI is completely customizable with SAS Risk Governance Framework, and that is just one of its many features. To learn more about SAS Risk Governance Framework, visit the e-course available through the SAS Learning Subscription: Course: SAS® Risk Governance Framework: Solution Overview.