On the anatomy of operational risk

The paper aims to contribute to the improvement of all the phases of the risk management process, enlarging the traditional description of cause-effect mechanisms (called ¿pathology¿ based risk analysis) with some ¿inherent¿ characteristics of operational risk that could impact on the organizations core capabilities (called ¿anatomy¿ based risk analysis). After the proposal of a new operational risk definition, the paper describes the anatomy modelling of operational risk. A case study in project-based operations will be used to qualitatively compare the advantages of the anatomy-based approach with respect to the pathology approach, within the entire enterprise risk management process.