2) the development of an instrument based on an organizational maturity model, to evaluate the
risk-management capability of construction organizations. The latter stage also included the identification and
organization of a comprehensive set of best practices for helping companies to overcome identified gaps in their risk
management practices. The final goal of the whole research project is to design and construct a web-based computer
prototype of a risk-management support system. The idea is that the evaluation instrument be easily applied to any
construction organization that wants to evaluate its risk-management capability through the interaction with the webbased
questionnaire. In addition, this prototype would permit: (1) to store historical risk information and knowledge,
(2) to guide companies and organizations in the development of the desired risk management capability, according to
the established model, (3) to conduct the assessment and monitoring of the maturity of an organization’s riskmanagement
capability, (4) to have tutorials and being able to educate employees about risk-management depending
on the hierarchical level and responsibility that every employee has in a company, and (5) to have a storage and
retrieval system of best practices to help companies to improve their risk-management performance continuously.
Results of this research will allow a client or contractor to develop a risk management function based on best
practices and second, to improve the performance of this function along the realization of new projects. The novelty
of this approach is that it addresses the risk management function from a knowledge-based perspective, which does
not exist in most of organizations and companies in our country. Also, an additional interesting contribution will be
the best practices model that is being developed and that will be used as a benchmark for evaluation and
Alfredo Serpell et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 194 ( 2015 ) 201 – 210 203
improvement. Finally, the instrument for evaluating current risk management capabilities by applying a maturity
model will help to improve the performance of Chilean construction organizations, companies, and projects.