Enterprise Governance Risk and Compliance: New Standard to
Meet Customer Demands
Abstract
To bring
governance, risk and compliance together in an integrated program where
policies, data and controls are strategically managed and visible throughout
the enterprise. An enterprise governance, risk and compliance (Enterprise GRC)
strategy, supported by a common technology platform, creates consistency and
transparency, enables collaboration, fosters operational efficiencies, and
ensures the continuity and success of the business.
Problem
statement
Treating each risk and compliance issue as an
individual problem, organizations must look for a common approach to managing
risk and compliance across the hyper-extended enterprise. Organizations that
don’t achieve this level of collaboration are paying a significant cost in
terms of wasted resource, increased complexity, decreased flexibility and, and
even greater exposure to risk that threatens business performance and growth.
Explore each cost briefly:
Wasted resource: Instead
of prioritizing how resources can be leveraged to meet a range of needs,
organizations tackle issues one-by-one, resulting in varying processes,
systems, controls and technologies. The excessive time and expense required to
do this tasks the focus away from business initiatives that can improve the
bottom line.
Increased
complexity: Inconsistent risk and compliance approaches introduce greater
complexity to the business environment and with complexity comes increased
inherent risk. When controls are not streamlined and managed consistently,
there are more points of control failure and compliance gaps. Furthermore,
inconsistency in controls means inconsistency in documentation of risk and
compliance, which can further confuse the organization, regulators and business
partners.
Decreased
flexibility: When an organization is spinning multiple risk and compliance plates,
its ability to respond to other issues is compromised. The organization ends up
doing a substandard job on the plate-spinning and sees its own business
performance suffer because it is less able to respond to emerging
opportunities.
Greater exposure: With the focus on what is immediately at hand and not on what the
business needs to protect itself in the long run, an organization will find
itself facing more present threats rather than fewer. Duplication of process
and gaps in coverage are bad enough, but when they aren’t visible at the
governance layer, the business is at the brink of exposure to serious risk.
Our
solution
Organizations frequently rely on a document-centric,
paper-based approach to risk and compliance management, rarely attaining
sophistication beyond electronic documents and spreadsheets. Aside from being
error-prone and inefficient, this approach makes it difficult to share
information, thereby reinforcing silos. Today’s business requires a technology
architecture that integrates with other systems and provides for a cohesive and
common Enterprise GRC platform. This platform should tie into enterprise applications
and infrastructure, consolidating the information necessary to manage risk and
compliance throughout the organization.
Centralized views:
A central view of
risk and compliance activities provides a single lens through which
stakeholders can identify threats early and prioritize issues, as well as
improve efficiencies by applying a single process to multiple regulations
Automation:
Through
automation, organizations achieve continuous risk and continuous risk and
controls monitoring as opposed to the point-in-time spot checks of the past.
Technological capabilities required include advanced risk analytics and
modeling, automated controls tied to business rules engines, advanced content
and process management capabilities, and embedded Enterprise GRC control
points.
Integrated systems:
Multiple point
solutions that span different areas of the infrastructure are costly to manage,
fail to deliver a holistic view of the enterprise and cannot correlate analysis
to provide reliable conclusions. Integration enables management and reporting
across the enterprise.
Flexibility:
An Enterprise GRC
platform must be adaptable in order to evolve as business evolves. Furthermore,
business users must be able to make changes and build out applications to solve
business problems without relying on costly, time-intensive custom development.
Every business has different risk management and compliance requirements, so
the Enterprise GRC platform must be tailored to and organization’s specific
needs and structure.
Evidence
the solution works
Single,
consolidated platform with configured modules to manage GRC initiatives:
·
Facilitates shared practices and reuse of work,
resulting in efficiency and cost savings
·
Provides greater visibility of enterprise-wide
GRC programs
·
Provides greater flexibility for users to
configure modules to meet their needs without imposing a one size fits all
approach
Role-based
dashboards:
·
Increases productivity because users know what
they need to do from a single place with notifications and tasks clearly
identified
·
Reduces the need have to navigate to multiple
pages; with a single click, users can perform assessment activities
User-scalable
qualitative and quantitative analysis models that provide scores on risk:
·
Allows risks to be understood from the
perspective of the entire enterprise
·
Allows each line of business or risk discipline
to determine its individual criteria for scoring risk significance
Criteria
Based Thresholds:
·
Allows management to set risk tolerances and
decide the best course of action when risks exceed tolerances
Competitive
approaches
Our Enterprise GRC solution will helps clients develop a broad
vision and approach to clearly articulate, quantify, and proactively manage
risk, while assessing potential performance impact. We also help manage
expectations about risk management effectiveness for internal and external
stakeholders. GRC approach, enabled and helps improve the sustainability,
effectiveness, efficiency, and transparency align the processes with the
organization’s strategic goals and objectives; and drive competitive advantage
and shareholder value.
Entraprise GRC service is an integrated framework that unifies
governance, organization and infrastructure, enterprise assurance, culture and
behavior, and risk profile functions to achieve a consistent and holistic
vision across the organization. This integrated approach for developing and
establishing a successful and sustainable GRC framework effectively replaces
existing piecemeal approaches with more wide-ranging GRC solutions, builds
scalable enterprise frameworks, and enhances responsiveness to risks and
opportunities
Current
status
It is important to note that Enterprise GRC isn’t
just a technology buy. The success of an Enterprise GRC program depends on how
well organizational stakeholders work together to share information and
integrate their efforts to enable a holistic view of risk and compliance across
the enterprise. Therefore, it is a combination of people, processes and
technologies that all must be aligned behind a common goal and commitment. To
sum up, the Enterprise GRC strategy roadmap includes these key phases:
Inventory:
Take an inventory
of individual risk and compliance processes across the organization. This requires
that the organization step outside of internal silos and collaborate on a range
of risk and compliance issues.
Analysis:
Identify which
parts of the organization have strong processes and where processes can be
improved, specifically by introducing automation and eliminating redundancy.
Goal-setting:
Outline where you
want to be in three years and model the ideal Enterprise GRC strategy and
implementation approach. Think outside of box so you are not locked into
current approaches and processes-many of which may be failing.
Planning:
Build the plan to
achieve the desired Enterprise GRC strategy and implementation approach.
Identify the biggest Enterprise GRC issues and address the most visible and
inefficient issues first. Think big picture, but start in areas that can
provide quick wins.
Of course, prioritization of risk and compliance
activates must be decided at the business level to ensure maximum impact and
sustainability. An Enterprise GRC strategy roadmap requires executive buy-in
and support, which provides endorsement of the effort and overcomes obstacles
of solid entities wanting to work independently and do things their own way. As
with any new paradigm, implementing Enterprise GRC requires a committed change
management program.
Next
steps
One thing is certain:
risk and
compliance burdens are not going away. Government regulators continue to
influence control upon organizational practices through tighter regulation, and
business partners are requiring stronger controls within their relationships.
The globalization of business introduces significant risk with more points of
vulnerability and exposure. The time is now for organizations to define and
implement an Enterprise GRC strategy that drives accountability,
sustainability, consistency, efficiency, security and transparency. Selecting
the right technology vender that provides for enterprise-level control and
integration of risk and compliance is critical step that organizations should
not lightl
y.
That said,
organizations face an array of technologies
to consider as the foundation of their Enterprise GRC program, and the process
of selecting the right vendor to build a sustainable Enterprise GRC program can
be overwhelming. When evaluating IT vendors, organizations should consider the
range of risk and compliance requirements impacting the business and select a
vendor that has the strongest integrated solution to manage these requirements
on a consistent, ongoing basis, the right technology plat form lays a strong
foundation for an effective Enterprise GRC strategy.
References
