Building a Winning GRC Strategy

As regulatory landscapes grow increasingly complex, organizations are turning to governance, risk and compliance (GRC) programs as a force-multiplier. When implemented effectively, GRC can drastically improve an organization's ability to efficiently navigate rules and requirements while becoming more risk-intelligent. However, capturing these benefits requires taking a holistic, strategic approach from the outset.

Before any technology is evaluated, organizations must first build a rock-solid business case that articulates GRC's potential return on investment to stakeholders across functions. This means taking a brutally honest assessment of your current state - inventorying all the existing tangible and intangible elements related to GRC like systems, documents, processes, workflows, controls and more.

From this "as-is" baseline, you need to define the desired "to-be" future state, identifying all the gaps between the two. How can GRC enable streamlining and automating inefficient manual processes to save time and costs? How can it improve visibility, accuracy and completeness of risk and compliance activities? How can it enable greater organizational agility in detecting and responding to changes in the regulatory environment? Quantifying both the concrete cost-savings and harder-to-measure qualitative benefits is critical for building a compelling business case that wins over stakeholders.

GRC initiatives touch multiple functional areas like risk management, compliance, IT, audit, ethics, security and more. As a result, any GRC strategy requires collaboration and buy-in across different teams and department lines. When faced with resistance or skepticism from certain individuals, the first step should be educating them on GRC's value proposition using the business case data.

However, in situations where stakeholders remain unwilling to engage, it may be necessary to initially work around them. Gain early support and successes from functions that are onboard, using those demonstrable wins to gradually bring lagging teams into the fold.

Selecting the Right Solution through Meticulous Evaluation

With an overarching strategy defined and stakeholder support secured, the next major step is identifying and selecting the appropriate GRC technology solution(s) through a formal request for proposal (RFP) process. In my experience, many organizations take the easy route of simply reusing RFP templates provided by GRC vendors, which is unwise as those are inevitably biased toward the vendor's own products and services.

A better approach is consulting peer organizations who have already gone through GRC software selections, tapping professional services firms with deep domain expertise in this area, or using third-party RFP template libraries designed to be objective. The RFP should codify the organization's specific requirements, uses cases, existing technology landscape and more that any GRC platform must integrate with.

As proposals roll in from vendors, the diligence must ramp up further through in-depth discussions with customer references. Don't simply take positive endorsements at face value - dig deeper into where the solution has fallen short, what issues and challenges the customers have faced, and what areas of the product require improvement. Pay close attention to whether the vendor has demonstrated a strong track record and use cases parallel to your organization's needs.

Developing a truly robust and sustainable GRC program requires diligent planning, change management, and stakeholder alignment across the organization. By starting with a clear strategy backed by a quantified business case, thoughtfully managing stakeholder engagement, and taking a meticulous best-practice approach to solution evaluation, organizations can maximize their odds of achieving GRC success.

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