Governance, risk, and compliance, or GRC is a strategy that allows organizations to comply with various business compliance standards while correctly aligning IT activities with business objectives and also minimizing risk.
What Is GRC?
Each major component of governance, risk, and compliance is expertly designed to give businesses the tools they need to successfully deal with everyday problems. Each of these aspects, however, also deals with a specialized point of impact:
- Governance – Ensure that each activity done by the organization supports the specified business goals.
- Risk – Minimize any risk associated with the activity by correctly identifying and addressing the issue through a solution that supports the specified business goals.
- Compliance – Make sure that each activity complies with various laws and regulations while still furthering the specified business goals.
How Does It Work?
Although each aspect is designed to solve a specific problem, each is also created to work together as a whole. The resulting combination can then be used as a framework by the organization in order to provide the leadership with the ability to correctly formulate a strategic plan in order to enable the organization’s main objectives. When properly designed, the framework will allow the organization to measure its progress as well as the effectiveness of its efforts. By acting as building blocks for the organization, the framework is able to tailor their environment for success.
How To Successfully Employ GRC
Successfully implementing this framework, however, is not easy. It requires the leadership to be fully onboard with the changes in order to be effective. This means that the successful implementation of the framework requires a complete culture change of the entire organization. As any sort of culture change begins at the top of the hierarchy, the leadership of the organization will be required to understand the system in order to better support this change. On the upside, a successful cultural shift will lead to a stronger foundation of changes giving the framework a much more stable base to build upon.
What Does A GRC Solution Do?
Implementing a Governance, Risk, and Compliance solution does more than just provide a business with a tool: it creates a path to success. It enables businesses to create and coordinate policies as well as to map them to various regulatory and compliance requirements. These solutions further enable the business to implement other processes that can help to create more efficient processes while also helping to reduce potential complexity in the system. By using a proprietary framework to help implement these solutions, a business is able to more easily manage GRC activities.
Why Is It Important?
As businesses grow in size so will their complexity. If left unchecked, potential problems can arise. By implementing a framework, however, most of these problems can be prevented ahead of time. Through this framework, a business is able to break down the barriers that a business must face in order to grow. By forcing various units within the business to work together, the chance of success of many of the company’s strategic goals greatly increases. This means that the successful implementation of the framework is a requirement for any future business that wishes to move forward.
Looking Towards The Future
Being able to properly manage GRC activities is the key to any organization’s success. By successfully implementing a framework, businesses are able to accurately gauge their progress toward each of their primary business objectives. The result is a clear roadmap towards their next objective as well as a path of progress that offers leadership a view of the best way forward.