AI Governance Engineer
GitHub

Root-cause analysis (RCA)

By Updated

The review that answers why an incident happened and why the controls did not stop it, using techniques such as five whys, fault tree analysis 1 and blameless post-mortems, and codes each confirmed cause against a taxonomy that names the control that should have caught it.

Developed in
ch. 17, Root-cause analysis
Chapters
ch. 17, Incidents
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

3 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

Root-cause analysis (RCA): mentions per chapter9 mentions of the term across 3 of the 23 chapters of the Body of Knowledge; the chapters the glossary cross-references are drawn solid.Cross-referenced chapterOther chapter06 The Role: 1 mention06 The Role110 Reading List: 1 mention10 Reading List117 Incidents: 7 mentions17 Incidents7No mentions in the other 20 chaptersSource: the Body of Knowledgev0.5.0
Root-cause analysis (RCA): mentions per chapter9 mentions of the term across 3 of the 23 chapters of the Body of Knowledge; the chapters the glossary cross-references are drawn solid.Cross-referenced chapterOther chapter00010203040506 The Role: 1 mention106070810 Reading List: 1 mention11011121314151617 Incidents: 7 mentions717181920212223Source: the Body of Knowledge v0.5.0
Mentions per chapter How often each chapter names the term, with the chapters the glossary cross-references drawn solid. The longest bar is where to read the term in use; bars spread across many chapters mark a term that runs through the discipline.
Mentions as a table
Mentions of Root-cause analysis (RCA) per chapter
ChapterMentionsCross-referenced
00 Preface0No
01 Definition0No
02 Why Now0No
03 Values & Principles0No
04 The Stack0No
05 Patterns0No
06 The Role1No
07 Maturity Model0No
08 Regulatory Map0No
10 Reading List1No
11 AI Defined0No
12 Governance Program0No
13 Risk Management0No
14 Development0No
15 Deployment0No
16 Fairness & XAI0No
17 Incidents7Yes
18 EU AI Act0No
19 Privacy & AI0No
20 Existing Law0No
21 AI Laws Worldwide0No
22 Principles & Standards0No
23 AI Agents0No
  • Blameless post-mortem

    An incident review that identifies contributing causes without indicting any individual or team, on the premise that people acted reasonably on what they knew…

Sources

  1. [1] IEC 61025:2006, Fault tree analysis (FTA) (edition 2.0). IEC. 2006-12-13. https://webstore.iec.ch/en/publication/4311 (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Root-cause analysis (RCA). In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/root-cause-analysis-rca. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026rootcauseanalysisrca,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Root-cause analysis (RCA)}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/root-cause-analysis-rca}
}