A Practical Guide to Optimizing GRC Processes

Businesses want to create value by streamlining existing processes and getting the most out of their arsenal of security and compliance tools, all while hoping to avoid the risks, pains, and challenges that come with these efforts. This sentiment is true of virtually any aspect of business operations, but it’s especially accurate when describing the way that organizations often approach governance, risk, and compliance (GRC).

GRC is an area where rapid technological advancements have taken place in just the past few years. These advancements – which are driven by capable automation, integrations, and even AI –  have created tremendous opportunities for organizations to optimize governance, risk, and compliance processes by making them more effective and efficient. At the same time, though, the complexity of GRC still often makes it especially challenging for organizations to embrace positive change in this realm.

But remaining stuck in the “old ways of doing GRC” is not a sustainable or viable option for companies that want to do everything they can to manage risks effectively and continually build and maintain the trust of their customers. Instead, businesses must embrace these changes to how we approach GRC, even when it’s not always easy.

The challenges of GRC optimization

Even by the standards of business process optimization, which is rarely simple, GRC optimization tends to be particularly challenging for several reasons.

One is the sheer and inherent complexity of the GRC space. Assessing risk and demonstrating compliance requires collecting large volumes of data from disparate sources and then analyzing it in a way that conforms with the standards defined in constantly evolving compliance frameworks. This is no easy task, and businesses that have found a process that works are often loath to make changes – even if the existing process is suboptimal.

Technology creates barriers to change, too. In many cases, the systems that businesses need to pull data from (such as CRM and HR software) to perform compliance assessments are legacy platforms that lack APIs or other simple means of data transfer. Here again, the result, in many cases, is a reluctance to make changes that may disrupt whichever processes are already in place for collecting data, even if they are slow or difficult to scale.

In addition to these challenges, governance, risk, and compliance typically involves many stakeholders – not just compliance officers but also security teams, finance departments, executives, and more. Convincing all of these people to adapt to new tools and processes can be a tough sell, even if the end goal is to improve GRC outcomes.

Finally, there is a cultural element that can complicate GRC optimization. Many businesses are invested in particular compliance technologies and processes – often ones that worked well in the past but are no longer optimal by modern standards. Many of these processes have also become overly complex and unwieldy to sustain, but simplifying them can seem very daunting. Recognizing that those solutions are no longer ideal can also feel defeating, especially for the people who chose and continue to use them. It’s always challenging to admit that the way you’ve been doing things is subpar.

See also: Using Process Intelligence to Ensure Global Compliance

Best practices for optimizing

But again, remaining bound to outdated GRC tools, processes, and practices is not a recipe for success. This hold on the status quo deprives businesses of the ability to maximize the scalability, repeatability, and maturity of GRC over time.

To avoid that pitfall, organizations should embrace practices like the following, which can help to optimize the way they approach GRC.

Make GRC understandable actionable

Often, GRC can feel abstract because requirements are defined in complex frameworks. This can make it challenging for stakeholders to determine what an efficient approach to implementing the requirements looks like.

Compliance teams can address this challenge by distilling GRC requirements into actionable, understandable, and easily auditable tasks or specific practices. When they do this, it becomes easier for stakeholders in areas like engineering and finance to recognize exactly what they should be doing to streamline compliance and risk management, which existing processes are not working well, and how they can improve them. These team members will build confidence over time in demonstrating consistent performance against these understandable requirements.

Look for (and reduce) process inefficiencies

As GRC requirements and the tooling surrounding them evolve, it’s often the case that a process that was optimal at one time no longer is.

For instance, imagine a process where engineers create a Jira ticket to document a change they’ve made to a system. Now, imagine that the team adopts a new tool that automatically logs changes, making the ticket process redundant. In this case, the Jira step can be removed from the process to add efficiency without compromising auditability.

GRC optimization hinges on reengineering processes like this one whenever opportunities arise.

Evaluate automation and AI capabilities to support GRC

GRC automation software – meaning tools that automate tasks like collecting and analyzing compliance data – have come a long way in recent years, and they’re poised to continue evolving. Tooling that was cutting-edge just five years ago may no longer offer as many integrations or customization options as more modern solutions. Many of these now incorporate well-trained AI models to assist in common GRC functions.

For this reason, it’s critical to follow changes in the GRC tooling space and ensure that your business is taking advantage of the latest automation and AI capabilities. Fully automating GRC is not a realistic prospect; humans will always be necessary to perform and validate some tasks. But software tools can do an increasing share of the work, leading to more efficient GRC processes and more effective risk management.

Measure GRC value and showcase your efforts

To demonstrate that governance, risk, and compliance changes are moving the needle in the right direction, it’s critical to be able to track the ROI of new GRC tool investments or process changes. This is not always straightforward because there are many variables at play when assessing the value that GRC creates, and a full discussion of how to quantify GRC ROI is fodder for another article. But suffice it to say that businesses can, and should, track data such as risk levels and audit outcomes, then correlate them with GRC changes to gain visibility into what’s working well – and, just as important, what’s not.

Governance, risk, and compliance efforts can easily be showcased via a Trust Center – meaning a customer-facing portal where customers can, in a self-service manner, answer their own security, compliance, and privacy questions in order to gain confidence in their organization’s posture. These interactions can be measured to help further inform a GRC strategy and to identify which impacts these trust-building GRC functions are providing to your own organization.

Conclusion: Changing GRC for the better

Long gone are the days when an optimal approach to GRC amounted to reporting data in spreadsheets, capturing evidence in shared folders, and facilitating audits using ticketing systems. With the new opportunities created by modern GRC technologies and practices, we all must heed the call and undertake the challenges of actually implementing these more novel solutions.

Fortunately, it’s possible to work through the natural wariness toward change with which many organizations struggle and to make improvements that translate to faster, more accurate, and more scalable GRC processes.