Modernising GRC for Enhanced Risk Management

By Lewis Martin (lewis.martin@ka2.io) and Andy Downs (andy.downs@ka2.io)

 

For modern organisations, change is the only constant. Just over the last year, organisations around the world have adopted new technologies at a record rate and change will inevitably continue in the year ahead. Today’s organisations must continually innovate and evolve to keep pace with technological advancements, shifting customer expectations and ever-increasing regulatory requirements.

Organisations that can accelerate the speed of innovation will be better positioned to explore new business opportunities. However, these organisations must do so while carefully managing the risks and compliance requirements that come with continuous improvement and technology adoption. It’s a critical balance to strike. In this spirit, we outline here the key considerations to keep in mind on your innovation journey toward modernised and enhanced risk management.

What does this modernisation look like?

Managing risk and compliance requirements will require foresight and planning. It’s imperative for organisations to both forecast future-state operations and to articulate a plan to achieve this vision. This will likely include selection and implementation of platforms that support the adoption and automation of artificial intelligence (AI) at a secure yet rapid pace.

It’s helpful to consider governance, risk and compliance (GRC) modernisation as an “innovation journey” that integrates both services and systems for whole-process lifecycle transformation. From a people perspective, your innovation journey will include key business units like information security and service management. It’s also helpful to embark on the innovation journey with the right mindset—to successfully achieve digital transformation, your organisation must be prepared to challenge rooted “status quo” attitudes.

Remember, the goal is to shift from sub-optimal operations to improved processes, and to bring key stakeholders—both internal and external—along on the journey. Aim for rapid deployments and releases but retain a focus on agility and incremental continuous improvement to deliver benefits and value at scale.

Managing risk has and always will be important. Most organisations have ingrained and siloed operating models with manual, inefficient and labour-intensive processes, all of which impact efficacy. GRC functions must connect risk across all business areas to provide a continuous view of events across the enterprise and prompt an effective response.

Modernising GRC with KA2 and ServiceNow

Bottom line: Today’s modern organisation must innovate to improve its GRC functions. However, accelerating digital transformation can be a complex undertaking. Fortunately, KA2 is uniquely positioned to help you on this innovation journey. We’re excited to share our unique Compliance Workflow Engine and leverage our partnership with ServiceNow to help organisations like yours accelerate the value of digital transformation and reap the rewards of an integrated, proactive risk management platform.

KA2’s Compliance Workflow Engine (CWE) provides a comprehensive solution that continuously monitors end-to-end compliance in real time to ensure you remain ahead of all GRC obligations. We couple our CWE offering with ServiceNow’s automated workflows to manage task-driven activities and support you in building a more resilient operation through ServiceNow’s lifecycle approach to anticipate, prevent, respond, recover and adapt.

Anticipate: Is your organisation prepared for risk?

Anticipating risk is the best way to plan and prioritise actions. The challenge often lies in disjointed systems, poor data and organisational silos. All of which can make it difficult for your organisation to understand the full risk landscape and potential impacts on different business areas. The solution is an integrated and automated approach to risk management. This enables you to leverage data that is aggregated from across the business to perform what-if scenarios and identify key areas and actions to prioritise based on risk assessment.

Prevent: Is your organisation focussed on risk?

Most operational procedures are designed for efficiency rather than risk or compliance. This can lead to overreliance on manual corrective controls, not to mention a lack of transparency. The best prevention, again, is to automate risk and compliance activities. These activities should be built into daily work and connected across your entire organisation. As a result, you can automate best practices, unify compliance processes and provide assurances around their effectiveness.

What about critical third-party platforms, you ask? Via ServiceNow, you can also institute a standardised and transparent process for managing the lifecycle for risk assessments, due diligence and risk response with key business partners and vendors.

Respond and Recover: Is your organisation ready to respond to an intrusion?

Many organisations are set up in such a way that they’re unable to respond quickly or safely to adverse events, like a data breach or cyberattack. In partnership with ServiceNow, our GRC solution ensures that robust continuity plans are created in advance to ensure quicker recovery, more informed decisions and a coordinated approach to recovery. This includes automated, cross-functional workflows and evidence collection to drive accountability while allowing team members to focus on higher-value tasks. 

Adapt: How quickly can you get back to normal, and what will you learn?

A resilient organisation is one that can bounce back quickly and easily after a disruption. Today’s resilient businesses also know that with each disruption comes a valuable learning opportunity. With KA2 and ServiceNow GRC’s workflows and processes, you can collect data, assess results and feed conclusions back to your team to create new plans or processes and prevent future disruptions. Greater cross-functional visibility will also help improve strategic planning and decision making and provide the insights your organisation needs to continually evolve, in 2021 and beyond.

We hope this post helps orient you on your innovation journey toward GRC modernisation. The right partner can serve as a critical guide, ensuring robust, effective solutions that will keep your operations secure yet scalable.

KA2 has an impressive track record of delivering significant enterprise ServiceNow projects. But don’t just take it from us! We were recently awarded a ServiceNow 5-star customer satisfaction rating by a global financial services organisation for our delivery of a GRC solution to replace an outdated, legacy tooling process that managed the bank’s Risks and Controls function. Utilising the KA2 Smarter Framework to accelerate time to value outcomes, our consultants consolidated existing capabilities to create and deploy the new solution on the ServiceNow platform.

If you would like to know more about this project, or our other 5-Star related ServiceNow engagements, our consultants are eager to have a conversation. Please get in touch today.