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The role of GRC keeps growing in the business world. GRC solutions are now a common sight at major organizations and there are a lot of exciting new developments happening in GRC. There is however a certain degree of uncertainty about GRC among many of us. Why do we need GRC technology? Organizations have always managed governance, risk, and compliance, then what has changed now? The answer to these questions will be clear once we look at where GRC emerged from and what makes it so important.
What is GRC?
GRC refers to using technology to align governance, risk, and compliance. GRC does not introduce new processes or increase the workload – it instead streamlines the current governance, risk, and compliance tasks so they are all working towards the same goal. GRC is not a type of software or a specific tool – all technologies that help align governance, risk, and compliance are considered GRC technology.
Why GRC is so important now
GRC has been enabled by the rise of information technology and would be an impossible endeavor without technology. Every organization in the world must ensure governance, compliance, and risk management. They were all managed manually and separately. Then came enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. There have been many technologies designed for better governance, but ERP was one of the first that was successful and went mainstream. Business processes that had always been manually handled were now completely automated.
This resulted in a boom in productivity and every organization wanted to test the waters with ERP solutions. While ERP may not seem that popular these days, the reality is that it became so commonplace that it isn’t even referred to as ERP anymore. Most office productivity solutions, even products like Microsoft Office, are full of small ERP tools or features.
Once organizations started managing compliance, risk, and governance through ERP tools a new fact came into light. Organizations realized that risk, compliance, and governance were intrinsically linked. They were managing three separate things when they should have been managing them together. The key thing to understand is that the goals of risk management, compliance, and governance are the same.
Any organization that wants to improve risk management and compliance will need to also improve governance as well. Any organization that wants to improve compliance will also have to improve risk and governance. The same is true for risk management – any issue in compliance or governance will also increase risk levels. Therefore it makes perfect sense to ensure synchronization between them.
The Benefits of GRC
GRC isn’t becoming popular because it is a fad or a trend – GRC’s popularity is because of the ROI it delivers. Managing risk, compliance, and governance with GRC technology removes redundant processes and tasks which results in reduced costs. The latest GRC solution also incorporate automation and artificial intelligence into the system which speeds up and automates processes. Tasks that used to take hours can now be completed in minutes, because all the required information and data is already available in one system. Monitoring is also automated – issues get detected and notifications are sent out automatically.
The Cost of GRC
GRC technology has become a common sight in the past few years because GRC costs have decreased dramatically. Most GRC technology and products were being produced by legacy vendors until a half a decade ago. These vendors made gargantuan solutions aimed at the biggest organizations in the world. While these solutions worked perfectly for large organizations, they were completely inaccessible and unaffordable for smaller organizations. The cost of these systems ran into seven figures.
Cloud based GRC technology has changed the GRC cost equation. These solutions are available under a SaaS (Software as a Service) model which allows organizations to subscribe to the solution. The advantage here is simple – instead of making a major investment on a GRC implementation organizations can start with a small-scale solution or tool. The costs for these solutions begin in three figures per month which makes them easy to acquire for even the smallest organizations.
About the company
360factors, Inc. (Austin, TX) helps companies improve business performance by reducing risk and ensuring compliance. Predict360, its flagship software product, vertically integrates regulations and requirements, policies and procedures management, risks and controls, audit management and inspections, and on-line training and qualifications, in a single cloud-based platform based on artificial intelligence.
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