Strategic decisions are more important than ever for enterprise-level businesses, but traditional management models fall short. As the size of your organization grows, so does the difficulty of coordinating policies, procedures, objectives, and controls. To overcome modern challenges, you need up-to-date solutions, such as governance, risk, and compliance technology. Effective GRC implementation can improve your communications, analytics, efficiency, planning, scalability, and decision-making processes.
What GRC Implementation Involves
Implementing a GRC framework means following the core principles of governance, risk, and compliance throughout your organization. The effects should be apparent in your short-term goals, long-term objectives, decisions, and technology investments. This requires:
- Governance: Following industry best practices for policies and oversight
- Risk: Identifying internal and external risks and managing them skillfully
- Compliance: Meeting regulatory guidelines and industry standards at every level
GRC takes an integrated approach to management. Instead of leaving procedures, risk mitigation, or compliance activities to individual departments, your entire organization follows a unified, data-driven framework. The goal is to create a culture of compliance where stakeholders adhere to controls naturally during operations instead of “forcing” corrections after the fact.
How To Create and Implement a GRC Framework
To be effective, efficient, adaptable, and profitable, a GRC framework must be customized to your organization’s unique structure and operations. In other words, implementing GRC really involves creating a framework from the ground up with your business in mind.
1. Identify Your Organization’s Needs, Challenges, and Goals
Building a strong foundation is one of the most important parts of implementing GRC. Careful planning takes time, but it makes the program more useful and delivers better returns on your investment.
Compliance Requirements
Make a detailed list of your current and target compliance obligations. If your organization must follow multiple regulatory frameworks (e.g., HIPAA and PCI DSS), it can be helpful to create a parallel map that shows common controls. This reduces the complexity of your GRC program and limits wasted resources.
Obstacles to Efficiency and Productivity
The primary purpose of GRC implementation and integration is to solve problems and streamline your operations. To do this, you have to identify the issues holding your organization back:
- Compliance violations
- Workplace misconduct
- Overlapping roles or duplication of effort
- Data silos and communication problems
- Outdated policies
- Competing, confusing, or contradictory guidance
Give each item a score based on importance or urgency. Prioritize the most important issues when designing policies and controls.
Organizational Improvements
GRC frameworks are excellent tools for making your operations more cost-effective or improving worker productivity. Compliance automation platforms like Compyl can help you identify bottlenecks and opportunities to improve your workflow.
2. Perform a Comprehensive Risk Assessment
Risk assessments are a vital part of GRC, helping you:
- Identify a wide range of risks that affect your organization right now
- Make predictions about risks associated with your objectives
- Determine the likelihood and impact of each risk
- Develop strategies for each type of risk
As part of this process, you should agree upon or apply your organization’s risk appetite. This affects everything from policy decisions and GRC priorities to corrective measures and third-party partnerships.
3. Map GRC Criteria, Define the Scope, and Set Objectives
The next step in GRC implementation is to map GRC frameworks to your operations. This means connecting the dots between GRC improvements and the parts of your business that need them.
Determine which areas of your operations have compliance requirements, such as access control systems or independent audits. What processes can benefit from increased risk management? Assign GRC controls to places in your workflow where current policies are ineffective, time-consuming, overly complex, or cumbersome.
You don’t have to use an organization-wide GRC framework, though there are advantages. Some enterprises begin with a limited scope, such as GDPR compliance or improved cybersecurity for HIPAA/HITECH certification.
Wherever you focus, set clear goals. Use figures and metrics for:
- Employee adoption/uptake percentages
- Compliance rates
- Productivity increases
- Cost reductions
- Time to complete risk assessments
- Mean time to action metrics
After defining your program’s primary objectives, create a GRC implementation roadmap with intermediate milestones. Tracking performance helps you measure your progress toward compliance goals.
4. Establish Roles, Responsibilities, Workflows, and Decision-Making Strategies
A solid governance structure is the backbone of GRC risk and compliance activities. Processes need oversight, which means assigning responsibilities to capable managers or audit teams.
Identify the roles required to comply with regulatory frameworks. For example, HIPAA requires healthcare organizations to name a HIPAA security officer and a HIPAA privacy officer, roles that ensure protected health information stays safe and confidential.
Identify key responsibilities for GRC implementation initiatives and create roles to manage them successfully. Your framework should answer who, what, when, and how:
- Who is responsible for creating, overseeing, modifying, and ensuring compliance with policies?
- What responsibilities does the role involve?
- When can/should a policy or procedure be updated?
- How can a policy be changed? What is the process?
The primary purpose of implementing GRC is to create a consistent framework that applies in every department, business location, and situation. Well-defined roles promote accountability, eliminate ambiguity, and reduce miscommunication issues.
5. Create Policies That Address Risks and Ensure Compliance
Coordinating between executive leadership, GRC managers, and other stakeholders, craft policies that align with program priorities, compliance obligations, and organizational goals. Follow a standardized approach but adapt policies to your company’s unique regulatory and operating environment, integrating them with your day-to-day business activities. Include risk management in policy decisions to determine the ideal path for your organization to follow.
6. Design Controls, Processes, and Procedures
Policies are like the steel girders of your GRC framework, giving it structure and making clear the direction your organization wants to take. To get good results, however, you need to be more specific.
Processes are like blueprints. They outline the necessary tasks for program execution, the overall route your organization needs to take from point A to point B. Risk management and compliance actions should be part of every process for GRC.
Procedures are like the physical structure of a building. They fill in the blanks, describing the specific actions workers must take to meet company expectations and compliance objectives.
Controls are similar to a building’s doors, windows, and alarm systems. They help you manage risks and monitor key processes. For example, cybersecurity controls often require daily data backups and continuous network activity logs. Controls are essential for compliance.
7. Set Up Reporting, Monitoring, and Auditing Processes
No compliance program works perfectly, which is why follow-up actions, such as audits and monitoring, are necessary. GRC frameworks rely heavily on analytics and reporting:
- Regular reports to keep senior management engaged and drive decisions
- Periodic audits to determine the effectiveness of procedures
- Monitoring activities to identify risks and detect noncompliance
- Controls to track progress toward program goals
Regulatory frameworks often outline the frequency of internal and external audits, from network vulnerability testing to risk assessments.
Your organization should also set up tracking for key risk indicators and key performance indicators. Common KPIs in GRC include compliance maturity level, total control violations, and severity of noncompliance issues. KRIs revolve around risk detection, mitigation, and remediation rates.
8. Plan for Improvements, Emergent Risks, and Regulatory Changes
Even though GRC frameworks are designed for large-scale and complex organizations, your program must be sufficiently flexible to adapt to changes. The regulatory landscape can change overnight for national and international businesses. New cyber threats and vulnerabilities grow rapidly, surpassing 50,000 in 2024 alone.
To keep up, your organization must prioritize risk assessments and vulnerability monitoring. Many enterprises review their GRC programs once or twice a year, making sure existing controls are up-to-date with industry best practices, regulatory changes, and cybersecurity threats.
Creating a robust management and audit program also has benefits for other organizational goals. Continuous improvements can lower your risk profile, reduce error rates, increase ROI and profitability, and eliminate productivity obstacles.
GRC Implementation Checklist
| What To Do | What It Means | What You Need |
| 1. Planning | Identifying GRC needs, setting goals, and creating a roadmap | Stakeholder input, regulatory requirements, and internal data |
| 2. Risk Management | Performing a detailed risk analysis | Analytics tools and quantitative assessments |
| 3. GRC Mapping | Pairing governance, risk, and compliance goals with your operations | Compliance or cybersecurity frameworks and a GRC tracking platform |
| 4. Governance Structure | Assigning roles and responsibilities | Detailed reports and board/C-suite meetings |
| 5. Policies | Setting policies that align with GRC goals | Up-to-date regulations and industry guidelines |
| 6. Procedures and Controls | Defining specific steps for compliance and risk management | Gap analysis, stakeholder feedback, workflow automation |
| 7. Reporting and Audits | Establishing audit processes and controls | Compliance monitoring tools |
| 8. Change Management | Planning for regulatory changes, risks, and improvements | Continuous risk and vulnerability assessments |
How To Update a GRC Framework
Does your organization still have the same GRC framework in place that you built decades ago? In that case, it’s time for an update. Modern GRC frameworks are less laser-focused on compliance activities and better at integrating effective risk management for improved defenses against market disruptions, insider threats, and cyberattacks.
Step one: Perform an in-depth gap analysis. The idea is to see where your organization is right now compared to where it needs to be. Then, identify any areas of your current GRC framework that aren’t configured to support the new goals.
Work closely with relevant stakeholders to find solutions that cause the least disruption to your activities. At the same time, look for ways to streamline compliance.
Finally, update your GRC program to include resources for change management. That way, you can make smaller, easier improvements over time instead of enormous changes every five or ten years.
Guide to GRC Implementation Best Practices
Follow these expert tips to simplify GRC implementation and make your framework more beneficial and powerful.
Make the Effort To Gather Stakeholder Input
Knowing what’s going wrong is important, but it’s more important to understand the underlying causes. GRC planning should involve meeting with a wide variety of stakeholders.
Get input from C-suite executives, department heads, managers, investors, and end users. Consult with HR, financial, IT, legal, product development, auditing, and other teams.
This approach balances financial considerations with process effectiveness. It combines the top-down benefits of management coordination with the operational insights from your personnel.
Use Workflow Automation
There’s no getting around the fact that humans make mistakes. There’s always an upper threshold for compliance rates if you rely on manual processes alone.
People forget to create documents, misfile validation records, accidentally delete emails, or postpone follow-up actions. In addition, some employees deliberately refuse to comply or actively harm your company.
Workflow automation tools can mitigate many of these problems. Automating processes improves logging, record-keeping, data loss prevention measures, security updates, threat detection, and access control. You reduce the burden of compliance and make risk management easier to carry out.
Get Senior Management Involved and Keep Them Engaged
The success of GRC framework implementation depends heavily on how board committees and C-suite executives view the program. Governance initiatives only work if company leadership sees the need to invest time and resources to follow through. After all, what good is conducting a risk analysis if management doesn’t do anything about the findings?
One solution is to assign an executive to oversee each GRC goal. You may have a GDPR compliance committee or a Chief Information Security Officer.
Another way to get executives invested is to approach issues from a cost-benefit perspective. Stop describing cyber risks and network assets in technical terms. Instead, present a quantitative risk assessment that shows the costs of inaction versus the necessary cybersecurity improvements.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel If You Don’t Have To
Regulatory compliance, cybersecurity, and organizational improvements sometimes require deep modifications to existing processes, but not always or everywhere. Your goal is to find solutions that deliver results, not to create new policies for the sake of policies. As long as you have good audit controls in place, nothing prevents you from starting with smaller changes and modifying your approach if more action is necessary.
Simplify GRC Implementation With Custom Frameworks for Your Organization
At Compyl, we have state-of-the-art tools that make it easier than ever to implement a GRC framework that fits your organization’s objectives and needs. Use compliance automation to seamlessly align your processes with GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and other relevant regulations. Contact us to learn more about integrating governance, risk, and compliance strategies cost-effectively.
