The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the go-to-bank for US tech start-ups deemed the largest institutional failure since the 2008 financial crisis. The bank’s failure is majorly attributed to its risk management failure, lack of accountability among the board, inadequate control measures, and poor communication.

As risks evolve rapidly, organizations must move beyond traditional siloed thinking to stay ahead. Adopting an integrated and connected approach to risk and compliance management is crucial for an organization. Failure to grasp the relationships between interconnected risks could lead to a domino effect, underscoring the importance of a holistic view of risk management. An effective strategy helps organizations know impending risks and make informed decisions.

Classification of GRC Model

Many organizations practice GRC to some extent, even if they don’t explicitly classify their activities as such.

The maturity of an organization’s GRC model can be classified into five levels:

Level 1: Ad hoc firefighting, where the organization reacts to risks without a defined process.

Level 2: Broad understanding of risk assessment and compliance management across departments, but lacking integration.

Level 3: Intra-departmental integration with a more mature GRC process.

Level 4: More proactive GRC process with inter-departmental integration.

Level 5: Agile, proactive, and responsive with security and performance evaluated in terms of meeting organizational objectives.

Achieve your compliance and risk management objectives – A five-step plan

To strengthen an organization’s governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) approach, achieving the aspirational stage with a well-crafted plan is possible.

Here is a five-step plan to achieve this:

Step 1: Define objectives by evaluating the organization’s capabilities, identifying gaps, and establishing long-term goals to guide the organization toward the target.

Step 2: Assemble the right compliance and risk management team to identify and evaluate potential risks, establish policies and procedures for compliance, and develop strategies that align with business objectives.

Step 3: Implement the right technology to manage compliance programs, monitor and manage risks effectively, including risk assessment, analysis, monitoring, and mitigation, for automation, integration, data analytics, and team collaboration.

Step 4: Continuously improve the GRC process by breaking up the project into achievable stages based on objectives, systematically implementing systems and processes, quantifying the value achieved at each stage, and progressively scaling objectives.

Step 5: Prepare for change by understanding the ever-evolving nature of risks, such as pandemics, wars, inflation, economic stress, and recession, to reach the aspirational stage of achieving agile and cognitive GRC.

The future of GRC is likely to shift from a traditional, reactive approach to a proactive and strategic one, using advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and analytics for real-time monitoring and decision-making. Additionally, there will be more significant integration of GRC activities across the organization.

Catering to every risk factor and each potential error manually is an impossible task. With the constantly rising stakes, there is negligible room for error and experiments. In such a pressing scenario, compliance management software like VComply can proactively manage the three critical aspects of your business: people, processes, and technology.

Investing in a GRC Software

You should look for certain capabilities while going for GRC software:

First and foremost, the software should be able to help you meet your compliance objectives. You should be able to manage your compliance programs across multiple locations or business functions and generate user-friendly, real-time reports from unified dashboards. Take a demo to understand how VComply covers all aspects of compliance management.

Conclusion

Though it might seem difficult and gruesome at a glance, you can strike a balance among various components of the compliance management program with the help of the GRC platform. VComply, an effective compliance management framework, can help you strategize in advance, safeguard your organization from heavy penalties and build your credibility in the industry.