Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) are critical components of any organisation's operations and managing these areas effectively is essential to ensure that the business operates within legal and ethical boundaries, mitigates risks, and meets regulatory requirements. GRC software can help businesses achieve these goals by providing a centralised platform to manage GRC activities.
If, as a GRC professional, you need to convince your Board of the benefits that centralisation and automation can yield within your risk management framework, read on. In this short blog, we’ll explore how to build your business case for implementing GRC software and get the results you’re looking for.
1. Identify the Problem
The first step is to identify the problem(s) or pain points that the software will solve. These could include challenges related to managing regulatory or compliance requirements, mitigating risks, or users replicating data across the business in a sea of spreadsheets. Once you have identified the key issues, you can then begin to explore how GRC software can help address these effectively.
2. Define the Objectives
Next, define the objectives that you hope to achieve by implementing GRC software. Goals may include improving compliance management, reducing risks, better embedding risk culture in the organisation, improving risk visibility and the accuracy of your internal risk data, or streamlining GRC processes. Defining these objectives will help you to measure the success of the GRC software implementation and help determine the return on investment (ROI).
3. Identify the Benefits
The benefits of implementing GRC software are numerous and can be far-reaching. Enterprise-wide visibility into GRC activities, increased efficiency, reduced costs, improved compliance...to name but a few. By identifying the advantages that GRC software will deliver, you get ready to quantify those benefits in order to build a compelling business case that clearly demonstrates the value of the investment.
4. Calculate the Return on Investment (ROI)
The potential savings that a GRC solution could yield for your business can be compelling for decision-makers. Calculating the likely ROI involves estimating the costs of implementation, together with licensing fees and ongoing maintenance costs. You can then compare this expenditure against the value-add that GRC software delivers including fewer and smaller risk-related loss events, reduced costs, increased efficiency and improved compliance, not least more engaged staff and by raising the profile of risk within your organisation, an enhanced risk culture. Establish and secure the budget and demonstrate a positive ROI, and you have the very heart of your argument for commercial viability.
5. Identify the Risks
Remember, replacing a legacy system or upgrading from manual, often spreadsheets-based risk and compliance management processes is not necessarily without risk. Your business could face implementation challenges, data security risks or user adoption issues. By identifying these risks upfront, you can develop a plan to mitigate them. Additionally spend time thoroughly researching your choice of GRC solution provider. In expert hands, the implementation process should be swift and seamless, and user adoption high through the combination of an intuitive, user-friendly tool and professional user training.
6. Get Buy-In
Finally, if your business case for GRC software is to be well-received, you’ll need to hone your presentation, ensuring it highlights the benefits of the investment in a clear and concise manner, illustrating that you have pre-empted any concerns and outlined how to address them. With buy-in from decision-makers and key stakeholders, the processes for securing funding and resources needed to implement GRC software successfully can be put into motion.
7. Ensure proportionality to your needs
Having considered all of the above points, you should ensure the provider you select is proportionate to your solution implementation. Due to Decision Focus’ flexible no-code configuration you might plan on having a solution up and running within as little as six weeks. Should you project be multi-geo, multi discipline and across audit, risk and compliance, identify the priority of your requirements. Ensure you don’t push too much onto the business simultaneously – end user adoption is key to success, so don’t overload them. Booking a demo with Decision Focus now, is the first step to us helping you put together your business case.
Strengthen your business case by choosing a modern, future-proof GRC platform
Decision Focus is a flexible, no code solution with a modern interface that users love. Designed to be configurable to the needs and maturity level of your business, your GRC solution can evolve apace with changing business needs and GRC goals over time.
Book a demo or get in touch with Jenny Ritson-Smith, Marketing Manager: jenny.ritson-smith@decisionfocus.com