As a leader of an organization, one of the most important tasks is managing enterprise governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). At its core, a compliance program is a set of internal policies and procedures that are put in place at an organization to ensure compliance with all laws and regulations.
The importance of a robust compliance program is especially true in the wake of increasing regulations such as SOX, PCI, and HIPAA and the rapid transformation that has occurred in technology over the last 20 years. The combination of these forces is shifting the way organizations are setting their strategic focus and how they are managed on a day-to-day basis.
Challenges of Modern GRC
Businesses need efficient ways to comply with regulations, manage and remediate threats and vulnerabilities from new technology, and be ready to pass audits from government agencies. Viewing different parts of a business in silos and managing enterprise governance, risk and compliance separately for each is no longer effective and adds to complexity of enterprise risk management.
Worse yet, it can cause corporations to suffer financial loses and diminish their brand reputation from government fines.
The Way Most Organizations Manage Regulatory Compliance
The fragmented and duplicate manner in which some businesses manage their compliance departments to ensure they are adhering to laws and regulations results in incomplete and inaccurate pictures of their organization. Rather than having built-in controls that ensure compliance, it is often reactionary based on government audits and fines from regulators.
Passing more stringent audit requirements has become more taxing on businesses, driving the need to proactively identify and remediate compliance violations before the auditors arrive. Effective technology is one way that businesses can automate GRC processes that were once completely manual.
Approaches to Manage Enterprise Risk
Enterprise and IT risks must be streamlined and managed to quickly identify and prioritize the remediation. Additionally, comprehensive corporate governance is a very time consuming process because of the in-depth understanding that is required of both policies and regulations. Those requirements must then be mapped to corporate controls by business subject matter experts, which is an arduous process.
The Critical Components of the Best GRC Solutions
Enterprises need to implement a GRC solution that will address the governance, risk, and compliance needs of the enterprise. Most require a solution that is agile, quick to implement, easy to use, and one that automates compliance processes in a single platform without an army of consultants. One subset of a robust GRC tool is enterprise risk management software.
Enterprise risk management software helps organizations track, monitor, and remediate risks through their organization and provides a central view of these risks. However, organizations also need solutions to manage their policies and procedures. So GRC tools must perform many different functions. The components of the best GRC solutions include:
- Software that is flexible and can adapt to the most complex processes and structures, without the need for coding or a costly development team.
- A solution that has evolved using real world implementation experience.
- Intuitive drag and drop features that allow you to create and link many complex compliance processes together – unleashing the power of a centralized GRC platform for reporting, tracking and auditing processes across an enterprise.
- A solution which has pre-built modular out of the box templates so you can solve your most critical pain points first, adding other solutions over time as the need arises.
- Software that has a shared data model for reporting, which gathers information from across all of your GRC programs into a single report view.
- Powerful yet affordable.
Bottom line is that organizations today require comprehensive solutions that are fast to implement and easy to use. The best GRC solutions must also be agile enough to adapt as businesses evolve and regulations change. Agile GRC has a much faster ROI than traditional systems given the rapid implementation time and flexibility. With the approach outlined in this article, you can ensure that your organization can build a gold-standard compliance program with effective technology.
Jon Siegler is a co-founder of LogicGate. You can read more about GRC Solutions that run on LogicGate on the Capria Solutions website.
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