No company is an island unto itself: Organizations are a complex and diverse system of processes and business relationships. Risk and compliance challenges do not stop at traditional organizational boundaries. Organizations today struggle to identify, manage, and control governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) across extended business relationships.
Investigations, done right, minimize or control loss, uncover systemic issues, identify risk areas, and provide information that drive continuous improvement initiatives. As a result, investigations are a critical cornerstone to governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) efforts in the ability to find and resolve issues to reduce exposure and contain loss to the organization.
The old paradigm of regulatory change management is clearly a recipe for disaster given the volume, pace of change and the broader operational impact of today's laws and regulations. Just as the CFO needs a financial system or the sales department needs CRM, legal and compliance need regulatory intelligence.
Most organizations fail to manage the lifecycle of policy, resulting in policies that are out-of-date, ineffective, and not aligned to business needs. It opens the doors of liability, as an organization may be held accountable for policy in place that is not appropriate or properly enforced. Organizations require a consistent process to develop, communicate, monitor, and maintain corporate policy and procedures.
While GRC is ultimately about collaboration and communication between business roles and processes, technology provides the backbone that enables GRC. To describe this technology, Corproate Integrity has defined the GRC Reference Architecture2 (this is closely aligned to the second version of the Open Compliance & Ethics Group (OCEG) GRC Technology Blueprint).
Corporate and regulatory compliance policies have forced companies to ensure that information flows are documented, auditable, and highly secure. Yet in order to conduct their business, companies must share sensitive information outside the firewall, introducing serious potential information risk.
Heightened merchant concerns over securing sensitive cardholder information, as well as new Payment Card Industry (PCI) security mandates, have driven demand for integrated card data protection solutions. These concerns are well justified.
Fraud in the insurance industry is nothing new; however, the growth of both telephone and Web-based sales channels provides fraudsters with greater opportunity to take advantage of insurance companies.