A signature in Diri is a recorded decision: someone accepted risk on the organisation's behalf, based on the result they were shown. Signing sets who owns the risk and how long the decision is valid. When the validity runs out, the assessment must be reviewed and signed again.
Signing works the same way for risk assessments, DPIAs and incidents, adapted to each:
Pre-assessments of vendors, IT systems, business processes, customers and AI systems are approved in their own report, see Pre-assessments. The rules for breaking a signature below apply to them.
The person who completes an assessment is often not the one who should accept the risk. In that case, send it for signing:
The recipient receives a task and a notification asking them to sign the assessment. The step shows Sent for signing to and the person's name. Only one request can be open at a time.
If the assessment has nobody set as responsible or owner, there is no one to send the request to. Set a Risk assessment responsible in step 1, Registration, and try again.
Your name, the date, the validity period and the risks accepted above the threshold are recorded on the treatment plan, together with the justification. The accepted risks are recorded in the risk acceptance register with the source Assessment signature.
If the plan could not be signed, you may not be entitled to sign this assessment. Contact your administrator. If the treatment plan could not be loaded, signing is not offered, because a signature records the plan as it was shown. Reload the page and try again.
Administrators set the Revision time — the length of time before a signed risk assessment needs to be reassessed — in Settings, in the risk assessment settings of each module. See Settings.
To renew, review the assessment, update it where needed, and sign it again.
Signing again supersedes the earlier signature; it does not replace it. The earlier signatures are kept and listed as previous signatures, with how many risks each accepted above the threshold. If someone else signs an assessment you signed, you are notified that your signature was superseded. You can turn this notification on or off in My Account.
An approval is never broken as a side effect. Any action that would retire an approval warns the person taking it first, and lets them cancel. This applies to forms, imports and the API alike.
A signature is broken by whatever changes the approved result:
A change that does not move the result keeps the approval, and Diri does not ask.
When a change would retire an approval, the dialog Break a signature? tells you:
For a delete, the dialog Delete, and retire an approval? explains that the record goes, that restoring it from the archive brings it back unapproved, and that cancelling deletes nothing.
An import cannot ask. Rows that would break a signature are held back and listed in the import summary, so you can decide what to do with them. See Bulk import.
Some assessments read other records. A business impact assessment, for example, reads the vendors, IT systems, policies and treatments linked to the process. A change on one of those records is made by someone who may not know the assessment exists, so it does not break the signature. Instead, the assessment is flagged: its result says Scored on records that have changed, names the records and shows the score they would give now. An approved assessment keeps its approval until it is saved again; an unapproved one cannot be approved until it is saved again.
Withdrawing is not breaking a signature: it is your own decision. Use Withdraw approval and give a Reason. The approval is removed, a withdrawal record is added to the audit trail, and the assessment can be approved again at any time. Withdrawals are listed in the signature withdrawal history.
When a signature is broken by a later edit, the signed version is kept under Previously signed versions, with its score, who signed it and when it was retired. A retired version is shown read-only, as it was when it stood.