Experience the Power of Connection

Introduction

It feels great to get back on the road and travel to see customers face to face. I have logged more than a hundred thousand miles and visited more than ten countries in the past three months. With all the technological advancements in the world, the inherent value of being face to face with customers is immeasurable. Trust me when I say, if you are not back in the office you may have forgotten what you are missing. The collaboration and productiveness alone are worth it. Even more, when people come together, they start to share ideas and cast a vision for the future.

We recently held two Customer Advisory Councils during the GRC Summit in London. The Councils were attended by CROs, heads of risk, senior risk, and technology professionals from several global financial institutions, energy, telecommunications, and technology companies from around the world.

I walked away with a healthy optimism and a view of the many things we are doing well and a few we can do better. What was clearest throughout my conversations is the vision we have for MetricStream resonates with our customers and that ConnectedGRC is not just a concept, it's a critical aspect of our customers' GRC strategy and the lens that every CXO should be using when considering risk.

What Does a ConnectedGRC Strategy Mean?

It's simple. A ConnectedGRC strategy empowers organizations to pursue an integrated approach to GRC and ensure collaboration between risk, compliance, audit, cybersecurity, and sustainability teams. It enables businesses to better identify, assess, manage, and mitigate strategic risks whether operational risks, IT and cyber risks, third-party risks, or ESG.

Critical to the pursuit of a Connected strategy are simplicity, automation, and predictive capabilities. These are the three core innovation areas where we are focused: Continuous, Cognitive, and Cloud.

With rapid regulatory changes and market conditions, workflow and sample-based assessments are no longer enough. Customers need real-time continuous assessments that are hyper-automated. They also need the ability to access the full population of data, rather than a sample, from various data sources. Recent advancements in Continuous Control Monitoring are making this possible.

Over the years organizations have collected vast amounts of data across risk, audit, and compliance programs. Cognitive capabilities including AI-centric workflows enable predictive and prescriptive capabilities. That means having a deeper understanding of emerging risks, the real cost of compliance violations, and monetary impact so that they can prioritize investments and resources.

Cloud is no longer about hosting in the cloud or cloud-native architecture. As businesses demand high performance and faster turnaround, low-code/no-code GRC platforms are the future. Without an army of high-skilled programmers, organizations can create and configure GRC applications with hyper-automated workflows and connected insights. The result is applications that are 10X faster, easier, and more secure. The cloud is the catalyst for radical changes in the way GRC application development, maintenance, and upgrades are implemented.

Empowering Risk Professionals is Critical to Achieve Success

This is all great but critical to long-term success is the need to empower risk professionals. As the business environment intensifies across all aspects of risk, risk professionals are being faced with an unprecedented level of pressure. Innovation can bring us only so far. There is great strength in banding together as a profession to bring about positive change and clarity of focus. This is precisely what we did at the recently held GRC Summit and will continue to do in the future as well– Experience the Power of Connection. We bring together global experts to share insights, and best practices and learn from each other but most of all use the time to problem solve and gain focus and clarity about the future of GRC.

I have been in this industry for more than 20 years, and what has been constant is the need to remain agile and flexible to change. If you think about it, it's probably the single most important attribute of a risk professional. But, today, with a ConnectedGRC lens you can not only remain agile and flexible, but you can add a predictive and proactive nature to your profile.