Integrated GRC
Software

An integrated GRC solution helps an organisation integrate its governance, enterprise risk management, compliance and assurance (audit) processes. By creating a single, unified approach, an integrated GRC solution can help an organisation optimise its overall business performance. An integrated solution helps a firm protect its reputation, enhance its financial performance, and reduce its risk and the risk of non-compliance. An integrated solution provides an organisation with a coordinated and systematic approach to achieving its objectives whilst protecting and enhancing business value.
Corporate governance is important because it creates a system of rules and practices that determines how a company operates and how it aligns the interest of all its stakeholders. Good corporate governance leads to ethical business practices and financial viability. In turn, that can attract investors.
The importance of strong corporate governance and managing risk is increasingly acknowledged. Organisations are under pressure to identify all the business risks they face, social, ethical, and environmental as well as financial and operational, and to explain how they manage them to an acceptable level. The board of directors/accounting officer/s plays a leading role in overall risk oversight and are appointed to:

• Grow and protect the asset value of an organisation and maximise shareholder and stakeholder value,

• Add value through a deep understanding of the business and the market in which it operates, including the downside and upside risks that face the organisation,

• Assist with strategic decision-making based on a good understanding of the business, the market, and the associated risks and trends,

• Be well informed and aware of the risks (leading and lagging) that may affect the sustainability of the organisation and how well they are being managed,

• Play an active role in ensuring sound governance and ethical behaviour in order to protect the brand and minimise reputational risk,

• Ask the complex and sensitive questions of the exco / management to ensure that the ‘real’ risks are uncovered to ensure a balanced view point when making management decisions,

• Review risk tolerance and appetite across the organisation, ensuring that exco and management are operating within the boundaries and authority vested in them by the various stakeholders.

Management is responsible for establishing and operating the risk management framework on behalf of the board/accounting officer. GRC brings many benefits as a result of its structured, consistent and coordinated approach. An effective GRC process and system greatly assist an organisation in achieving its objectives by:

• Improved understanding of the key risks and their wider implications,

• Identification and sharing of cross business risks,

• Greater management focus on the issues that really matter,

• Consolidated reporting of disparate risks at the board level,

• Fewer surprises or crises,

• Identification and taking advantage of opportunities,

• More focus internally on doing the right things in the right way.

As the world of data continues to grow exponentially, organisations must streamline their governance processes to be more effective. This includes integrating IT governance into day-to-day operations. Moreover, the CIO and senior management should have visibility over IT operations.

High performing entities embrace GRC management tools, shifting their focus to being proactive instead of simply reactive and driven by events. Proactive management of risk will assist in ensuring a meaningful return on resources invested, as well as decrease the amount of time spent on the management of crises. In this way, strategies can be developed that augment and develop the organisation’s opportunities.
BarnOwl GRC software provides an integrated, holistic, and system-driven approach to GRC and assurance. BarnOwl streamlines your processes, integrates risk, compliance, and assurance information on a centralised platform, standardises risk and control taxonomies, and offers the flexibility and scalability required for a changing business environment.
In summary, the BarnOwl GRC software:

• Delivers informed decision making, taking into account all inter-related risk, compliance, and audit factors such as objectives, risks, controls, incidents, linked risks, KRIs, audit findings, and combined assurance,

• Provides early warning and monitoring of problem areas with trend visualisation,

• Drives ownership and accountability of risk with action plan visualisation,

• Provides an integrated view of combined assurance across risk, compliance and audit.

• Provides in-depth insight into the risks affecting the achievement of your strategic and business objectives,

• Provides preventative and predictive risk intelligence enabling informed business decision making.

Pros

Allows businesses to:

• Streamline your GRC assurance process, save time, achieve better results, integrate risk, compliance and audit requirements all in one place

• Enable combined assurance ensuring that all blind spots are covered whilst at the same time ensuring that business is not overloaded with overlapping assurance related tasks

• Conform standards across all lines of defence / assurance provider

• Automate the monitoring of all assurance related activities in a coordinated manner

• Drive process improvement

• Protect sensitive data (strategy, strategic risks, opportunities, findings, tip offs, incidents, forensics etc.) in a secure central database with role based permissions

• Generate combined assurance reports and dashboards effortlessly

• Transform your GRC data into valuable business insight and foresight facilitating improved business decision making

Cons

Some of the barriers to using GRC software include:

• Excel is easy to use and provides flexibility for users to capture data in almost any format they wish. No need to conform to a standard methodology, data validation, drop down boxes etc.

• Conforming standards across various lines of defence and assurance providers (e.g. risk, compliance, audit, combined assurance etc.) is not easily achieved in large-scale organisations and requires change management and compromise

• Silo mentality rules across divisions and most of us like doing our own thing in our own way. Excel supports this approach perfectly

• Maintaining standards and clean and up to date library data (processes, risks, controls, audit programmes etc.) in a centralised database is the best approach, however can be onerous and requires time. This is still a lot more effective and easier than trying to consolidate 100s of spreadsheets across the organisation

• Reports / dashboards generated by the software do not always meet business requirements and require time and effort from business to scope and refine reporting to get the desired results

• Learning new software requires time and effort

• Return on Investment (RoI) for any software facilitating support-office functions such as GRC software, is not easily justified until something goes wrong which should have been picked up well in advance