In this article, we discuss the drivers and key traits of Agile GRC solution and services.

All organizations perform governance, risk and compliance (GRC) irrespective of what they call it – IRM, RM, GRC, ERM, ORM and so on. Every business has a different approach on how they conduct governance, risk and compliance.

It is also true that businesses of all sizes continue to perform many of the GRC tasks manually and in a disjointed ad hoc fashion. The challenges faced by these organizations have been borne out during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic struck, all resources were focused on securing the supply chain management and maintaining business continuity. Now, after almost a year of living with lockdowns and daily changing governmental guidelines, there is a distinct gear shift to focus on agility and automation.

The pandemic has forced organizations to become agile quickly and rapid technology adoption has been key to keeping personnel safe, maintaining operations survival. Previously automation often featured in the 3-year plan, now manual processes must be replaced with digital processes either using informal systems or fully automating them.

While both testing and vaccines are being deployed at pace, it is clear that businesses will need to adapt to working in a COVID-dominated world for the rest to 2021 and beyond. The return to ‘normality’ has changed for the foreseeable future, hybrid working practices driven by workers wanting a better work-life balance and governments wanting to reduce congestion and pollution will become the norm.

The new normal will drive important changes for 2021 and beyond.

Distributed workforces mean manual processes cannot work and the focus will be on automating business processes to enable staff to work from anywhere.

Staff can and will need to be trusted to understand and adhere to business policies and processes and there will be a paradigm shift to ‘trust but verify’ which will need to be underpinned by technology.

At the onset of the pandemic businesses scrambled to adapt to working remotely and temporary workarounds using spreadsheets, shared drives, SharePoint, Dropbox and so on were adopted very quickly. Now focus will shift to rolling back these workarounds with solutions that can support the revised business needs.

The adoption of informal processes will have highlighted the gaps in policies, processes and technology which will provide invaluable insights to management.

Ensuring your supply chain is in lockstep with your strategic business direction will also be key to success going forward.

Both regulators and auditors have been understanding through this challenging period, however, the focus will now be on organizations to elevate their standards to accommodate remote and distributed hybrid working environments.

These changing demands drive a need for GRC solutions to be ‘agile’ – the terminology is borrowed from project management as it shares traits such as responsive, flexibility, fast delivery, continuous adaptation and collaboration. 

Most leading GRC solutions are based on legacy architecture, inflexible, difficult to use, not intuitive, complex and most importantly extremely costly and time-consuming to implement. It is not uncommon for such solutions to cost upwards of $300,000 on annual licensing with ad-on implementation costs 4 to 5 times that ,taking 2 years plus to deploy. Future modifications require code-level changes and are costly exercises rendering solutions deficient before they have been fully deployed.

The changing landscape and the inability or unwillingness of market leaders to change has created the perfect opportunity for new more nimble entrants such as MaclearGlobal to provide Agile GRC solutions.

Key traits of Agile GRC solutions include…

Flexibility

The ability of the solution to scale and grow in step with the size and maturity of the business in flight without the need to re-code. Businesses can use the out-of-the-box applications or modify them or adapt them for a broad variety of use cases. Ready integration to third party application is a standard feature rather than an add-on costly exercise further inflating the total cost of ownership.

Industry and size agnostic

Agile GRC technology can be adapted to meet the needs of small-medium enterprises (SME) all the way up to complex multi-jurisdictional organizations. Similarly, the solution can be deployed to address a single business need such as Third-Party Risk Assessment or any combination of needs all the way up to full-blown Enterprise Risk Management.

Furthermore, the solution should be able to be adapted to address the needs of any industry without the need to re-program.

Self-service

In addition to a strong focus on user interface and experience, agile GRC solutions enable the business users to modify and expand in-flight without lengthy and costly change management. “No-code” or drag-and-drop enables businesses to move and adapt quickly and react to a situation like COVID.

Reportability

An Agile GRC solution puts the business and users front and center in the driving seat. Rich dashboards packed with data analytics provide users and management up-to-date insights into critical and emerging risks. Tiered reporting allows for drill-downs to the ground level all in one place.

Affordability

The single most important differentiator of Agile GRC solution is the total cost of ownership - with licensing and implementation costing a fraction of established legacy providers and implementation taking weeks not years. Built-in support and ability to self-service eradicate the need for costly change orders.

Going forward Agile GRC solutions will be seen as key enablers in ensuring businesses can adapt quickly to the new norm and help facilitate compliance, transparency, and alignment with the organization’s overall goals.

If your organization is learning more about Agile GRC, we invite you to explore the Maclear GRC Suite™ by visiting https://www.maclearglobal.com. Our comprehensive range of solutions is designed using best practices with built-in integration to reduce risk, improve performance, and enable strategic decision-making.

To learn more, request a demo, discuss a free trial proof of value or simply start a conversation drop an email to contact@maclear-grc.com.

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