Initiategrcinfluence

There are potentially multiple joint processes that could define the scope of Governance, Risk, and Compliance. GRC is not a single process, but a collection of processes with different roles defined and mechanisms embedded, such as roles and technologies to improve organizational effectiveness, agility, efficiency, and maturity.

Governance: Fundamentally, governance is about enforcing decision effectiveness, cross-functional management alignment, improving transparency and accountability, getting people, culture, process, and performance right. Strong corporate governance needs to have direct links to each crucial business management discipline and its processes to make sure that management is doing its job properly.

If there’s a problem with trust or lack of structure, then governance will suffer, because motivations are not aligned across organizational boundaries. Structured governance enforces the breadth and depth of business management with seamless alignment. It’s the act of guiding, influencing, and regulating the decisions and behaviors of the entire workforce to accelerate business performance.

Risk management: Risk management permeates across organizations and should not be a separate function at all. Enterprise wide risk management as a discipline with consistency, intends to manage enterprise risk systematically, streamlining business processes to ensure you have right risk management controls, develop an effective risk framework, and set the right risk appetite for improving enterprise risk management maturity.

It’s important to scrutinize process, structure, technology, people, along other critical success factors of the business, and collect feedback from the risk management process for increasing risk intelligence. Risk management systems and processes need to be highly automated, strategic, and transparent. Besides identifying risks, spotting opportunities, put in place a mandated risk tolerance structure via escalation requirements based on current risk ratings, embed risk identification and assessment in operational processes and multiple management disciplines to achieve risk management excellence.

Compliance: Compliance Management covers all relevant laws, regulations, internal standards and policies. At the strategic level, compliance requires a forward-looking strategic perspective to deal with unprecedented uncertainty and ambiguity, to deliver real-time accountability and transparency across regulatory areas. It stands to reason to assume that the laws, regulations, internal standards and policies imposed on- or adopted by a company are the starting point for the definition of any underlying operational and system process to remain compliant.

Compliance is very much a strategic issue and companies that do not recognize this are blindfolding to a great extent. At a high maturity level, compliance should be more than just looking at internal directives, but looking at the outside world as well. It is about looking at how the world and society are developing. A good compliance system must have morals and ethics incorporated into it. The effective compliance tool monitors change, enables information accountability, audits, measures the impact, and implements appropriate corrective actions to improve corporate maturity!

Governance today as a discipline is a living breathing entity which continually requires stroking and attention. Some old school of management thinks GRC is only for the bottom line, it is actually an enabler for business growth and innovation. Governance, risk and compliance should work really closely in order to create value. Integrated GRC includes more vital business perspectives, each providing a check and balance on harnessing strong management disciplines to lift up corporate agility and maturity