How to Correctly Plan and Implement A GRC Strategy in Your Digital Business

Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) policies in digital business encompass integrated practices that ensure that your processes align with regulations, industry standards, and internal policies. Most commonly it refers to governance structures, risk management, and compliance measures. The regulatory part of the digital landscape evolves dynamically and leans towards tightening measures, at the same time, risks and error costs continue to rise. This is why creating a specific GRC strategy is essential for digital businesses.

In this article, we will talk about key components and best practices for implementing a successful and suitable GRC strategy for a digital business.

Key Components of an Effective GRC Strategy

GRC is a complex and nuanced domain where the same strategy may work perfectly for one organization and be ruinous for another. However, there are common guidelines to follow, which allow for the creation of a successful GRC strategy that is tailored to your specific business needs.

1. Establishing governance frameworks

Governance frameworks play a vital role in defining responsibilities within your organization and empowering decision-makers at different levels. This typically involves clearly outlining roles and responsibilities, creating relevant documentation and company regulations, aligning these regulations with business goals and ensuring all employees are familiar with them.

2. Identifying and Assessing Risks

   
   

Risk management is a crucial aspect of a GRC strategy for various reasons. Conducting proper risk assessments and pondering their mitigation can save businesses significant costs by preventing potential accidents, rather than dealing with their consequences. For effectiveness, risk assessments need to focus on high-impact risks, and be conducted regularly and systematically. You can use AI tools to enhance risk analysis and assessment by identifying potential blind spots, gaps and increased human factor-related risks. This proactive approach helps in safeguarding the organization against potential threats and ensures resilience and sustainability.

3. Implementing Compliance Programs

Implementing compliance programs is about ensuring that the organization adheres to relevant laws, regulations, standards, and ethical practices. The important factor here is not to make these processes inflexible which renders them unable to accommodate frequent and ever changing legal requirements . It is recommended not only to consider the current regulations but also stay alert for forthcoming ones, preparing for them in advance and gradually, to ensure that any changes don't come as sudden disruptions for your company.

4. Integrating GRC into Organizational Culture

Integrating GRC into organizational culture is essential. Merely creating a GRC policy is insufficient if it isn’t integrated into daily routines and behaviors of employees at all levels of your organization. Only when GRC becomes a part of the organizational DNA does it become truly effective. The key point here is to understand how regulations translate into actual activities.

5. Aligning GRC Efforts with Business Objectives

A GRC strategy should never be detached from your company’s business goals, mission and values. In fact, it should actually support and add value to them. This alignment means that setting GRC priorities needs to be directly linked to key business objectives, ensuring resources are focused on areas of highest impact.

8 Steps to a Successful GRC Strategy

Now, from theory to practice. The following steps aid us and our clients in developing a functional GRC strategy that doesn’t deplete the security budget, remains transparent for performance assessment and is scalable and flexible.

1. Decide on the use of GRC Platform

This is where it is absolutely crucial to do your homework. Research and compare off-the-shelf solutions that are available on the market from the point of view of whether or not they cover all your GRC needs and determine if additional complementary tools are needed. Sometimes, it is worth investing in a custom GRC solution that is tailored to fit your particular GRC demands rather than try and make do with generic solutions that may leave certain areas uncovered. Consult with compliance and GRC experts and involve your solution architects in the decision-making process to select the best option.

2. Create a GRC Project Roadmap

Set your priorities and present them in the form of defined milestones and timelines. Make sure they are realistic and are broken down into manageable phases. Then assign responsibilities for the tasks on the timeline you’ve created. Make them transparent and avoid situations where too many cooks can spoil the broth. Communicate the plan to everyone involved.

3. Perform a Gap Analysis

This stage involved identifying the existing GRC processes and evaluating them against your roadmap objectives. Then compare your current practices against industry standards, regulatory requirements, and best practices. Once you’ve identified the gaps, prioritize them based on their risk and impact on your business, and plan actions to address them.

4. Determine and Align Stakeholder Expectations

Stakeholder engagement is essential for carrying out effective GRC policies. Make sure it starts at the earliest stages. If you have to (and you probably will), plan meetings to discuss and align on the GRC strategy's goals, priorities, and outcomes. Don’t stop there, you need to keep the stakeholders in the loop of all the GRC-related developments, gather and analyze their feedback and ensure their active participation in decision-making.

5. Define the Objectives

Use the SMART objectives-setting technique. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound and this abbreviation perfectly reflects the qualities that should define your GRC tasks. Incorporating regular reviews and feedback loops into GRC objectives is crucial for ensuring their effectiveness.

6. Conduct a Comprehensive Organizational Risk Assessment

Use a structured framework to conduct risk assessment activities. Another great tip here would be to maximize the use of existing resources such as leveraging the cross-functional expertise within your team. You may already have a compliance expert within your organization potentially working on other projects. Keep a comprehensive log or a documentation of all identified risks with set priorities and mitigation options.

7. Standardization

Standardization is key to maintaining consistency and effectiveness in your GRC policies. By standardizing procedures, training, and onboarding processes, you ensure that rules are interpreted uniformly across the organization. Develop a comprehensive set of GRC training materials and procedures making it mandatory for employees to be familiar with them.  Consider incorporating GRC clauses into employment contracts to reinforce compliance. Additionally, adopt and implement industry best practices tailored to your business structure. Conduct regular training and workshops to increase awareness of your GRC policies and keep employees updated on its developments.

8. Management and Revision

The process of refining your GRC policies is ongoing. This ensures its scalability, flexibility and alignment with industry standards. So, monitor it, conduct performance checks, gather feedback and identify improvement areas on a regular basis.

Best Practices in Creating a Working GRC Policies

Besides understanding the steps for creating and implementing GRC policies tailored to your business, here are some tips to ensure its effective execution.

• Starting small, simple, and focused

No need to roll-out a huge-scale system that will complicate matters for your company. Start small, try out, build on it and expand gradually. Keep the focus on high-impact factors.

• Leadership commitment

Cultivate initiative within your leadership by openly communicating GRC principles throughout the organization. Emphasize that these principles are fundamental to the company’s long-term success and reputation.

• Prioritize risk and compliance activities

At an enterprise level, this is what quantifies the value achieved at each stage of your GRC policy implementation.

• Engage your employees

This is where you can get creative. It could be interactive training sessions on ethical decision-making, workshops on identifying and mitigating risks in your workers’ operations, and forums for discussing compliance challenges. Do not forget to encourage feedback and show you value it.

• Introduce proper incentives

You can revise your company’s performance appraisal system to include GRC-related metrics. Your employees can be rewarded not just for achieving business targets but also for demonstrating adherence to compliance standards, ethical behavior, and effective risk management in their tasks.

Conclusion

Well-planned and implemented GRC strategy is crucial for success in today's digital business landscape. By establishing a robust operational framework, organizations can achieve regulatory compliance, effectively manage risks, improve efficiency, safeguard their reputation, and make informed strategic decisions. Furthermore, fostering a culture of GRC awareness among stakeholders promotes a sense of collective responsibility and accountability, encouraging an environment of cohesion and resilience.