While firms spend millions of dollars conducting and auditing compliance-driven activities, several of the steepest losses in valuation and market share were precipitated by strategic decisions which all but ignored the risks to the customer experience and the financial implications of a tarnished corporate brand. In the age of the customer, unless a technology continues to deliver value daily, it will soon be replaced by a competitor that does. The market for GRC technologies is no exception.

“The Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q1 2020” gives insight into how GRC vendors are making the transition from value protection to value creation. Our evaluation of the 12 most important GRC platform vendors in the market revealed the following insights.

For Value Creation, GRC Plays Offense

If GRC is synonymous with compliance, you’re looking for risk in all the wrong places. Risk managers demand technology that helps them anticipate change, protect digital transformation, and identify the right risks to take to help grow the business and serve customers. Creating value, not simply protecting it, requires firms to understand risks in the context of user experience, market dynamics, and business impact.

As companies progress and undergo digital transformation, GRC pros that make the shift from risk management defense to offense become essential business partners that can help the business understand the risk implications of what’s going on around them and how it could derail business strategy.

Compliance Is Your Floor, Not Your Ceiling

Let’s face it, in the age of digitalization, compliance is table stakes. The data to complete compliance-related tasks resides in the data center and/or business technologies such as payment, legal, and HR systems — let GRC platforms connect to it and not spend time recreating it. Where GRC platforms can help is by providing AI, machine learning, predictive analysis, and real-time monitoring to find, connect, and contextualize data — the most critical asset of the digital business.

Risk Is Not A Solo Sport

Risk and compliance pros don’t just want technology; they want a strategic partner and expect their GRC vendor to deliver value even after product implementation. That means making the platform intuitive and usable not only for the administrators but for end users and especially casual users. Organizations also expect vendors to provide best practices and even broker connections to a broader community of professionals outside their organization. For end users, “customer success” means more than technical support — it’s having a dedicated contact that can provide guidance and also help the customer articulate the value of their GRC program within the customer organization. The Forrester Wave™ evaluation reveals that end users are expecting vendors to play a more strategic role in the success of their program than ever before.

Some Vendors Are Already There

In our recent report, “The Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q1 2020,” we evaluated the functionality you need to run your GRC program today, as well as the capabilities you’ll need to manage risk across your entire organization tomorrow. We uncovered that leaders in this market are those vendors that help risk managers keep pace with the changing regulatory landscape and step into a new role that places risk managers as partners in the business helping make the right business choices.

Fortunately, a new breed of GRC platform vendors is helping risk managers:

  • Better correlate risks in the context of business strategies, enabling firms to quickly respond to market challenges, new risks, and evolving regulatory requirements.
  • Embrace change and anticipate disruption in order to build operational resilience during unforeseen events.
  • Provide risk management air cover for the company’s digital transformation and accelerate the pace of innovation.
  • Help the business build a level of digital trust with customers that aligns with the values of the business.

Read “The Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q1 2020” for the full analysis of where the GRC platform market is headed and how risk managers can take advantage of the cutting-edge features to fuel business innovation.