What is GRC Software?
GRC software (Governance risk management and compliance software) is considered a single source of truth throughout most businesses’ decision-making processes. It is a means for publicly-held enterprises to manage IT-related operations that require regulation and ensure they are meeting compliance and risk standards. The right tool can help you identify risks and opportunities, manage complex processes, delegate tasks, automate workflows, and capture data for business applications. When used correctly, it can help your quality control and compliance teams evaluate your firm’s compliance and performance.
It will allow your business to reduce the cost of poor quality, embrace continuous improvement, and increase customer satisfaction rates. However, not all GRC solutions are created equal, and choosing the right one will determine how effective it can be in running your business. In fact, modern GRC tools tend to be so differentiated that there are options that are created for specific businesses.
The Best GRC Tools
At Olive, we believe the ‘best GRC Solution’ is the one that meets the unique needs of your business or organization.
What does success look like when implementing GRC tools? Well, high user adoption is the most important measure. How do you ensure high user adoption? You involve key stakeholders in the decision-making process. This is the first step in creating a culture of change towards digital transformation and avoiding change management later down the line.
Understand that sourcing the right GRC Tools tech is not just about googling “best GRC tools”, and using reviews to choose solution vendors to demo.
Finding solutions that drive innovation requires a collaborative process involving key stakeholders. Going straight demo can create lots of risks. In the long run, missing key stakeholder needs or integrations can cost a huge amount of money and time and even hold back innovation. To be successful in finding the right GRC solution, companies must evaluate GRC solutions against the business needs, be agile and collaborative, and work together to avoid bias in procuring the tool.
Finding the right GRC technology is about agile collaboration with key stakeholders to ensure that you are procuring solutions that will actually drive digital transformation and that you are managing all of your technologies to ensure they all feed up to the big picture. This isn’t a one-and-done concept. We want to help you ensure that all your tech is working together for all your stakeholders, driving the business forward
Choosing the Right GRC Software Vendors
GRC software will do much more than keep you compliant to standards like the ISO and HIPAA. As such, you ought to identify why your business needs to invest in the tool. One of the easiest ways to do so is to use a User Requirements Specification (URS), a list of features your employees and stakeholders might be interested in. You can easily find a template of a URS online.
The template should help you establish your business’ pain points and all processes that work and those that don’t. Some of the features your business might need should help you with:
- Risk management
- Audits
- APIs and integration
- Document and policy management
- KPI setting and management
- Supplier management
- Maintaining training records
GRC Software Pricing
The pricing of GRC software differs from one vendor to the other. Understanding a vendor’s pricing system will help you pick a solution that will give you optimal ROI without stretching your budget excessively. Most vendors will include a variety of items in their pricing model, including:
- End users
- Hosting
- Implementation costs
- Differentiated modules
- Support and maintenance
- Training costs
- Administrator licenses
Ideally, you should set a specific budget for the solution you want and stick to it. Calculate the solution’s overall price over five years to ensure that it will be in line with your budget. However, your budget ought to be a realistic one- a budget of $50 per year might not offer you all the features your business deserves.
When starting out, list at least three goals that the software should fulfill, you could want it to roll out across the entire organization or offer the option of free end-users. Other businesses could also prefer a solution that suppliers can access.
Integrating GRC Software into Your Current Tech Stack
GRC tools are intended to be used by non-tech-savvy team members. As such, they need to be user-friendly enough for your entire team. Your ideal tool should integrate well with your existing systems with little friction.
The ideal solution should also be scalable enough to keep up with business changes. For instance, if you were to expand your team, it should allow you to add new users easily. Since regulations change from time to time, it needs to help you keep up with the dynamic nature of your compliance environment.
GRC Customization
Out of the box, most GRC tools might be ready to use. For most small and medium-sized businesses, they can offer turnkey solutions to their problems. However, some complex problems might be unique to your business. As such, investing in customizable GRC software can be quite helpful. This will allow you to tweak specific parts of the software’s functionality or even brand it to represent your business’ identity.
Training and Change Management on GRC Software
Most GRC tools tend to be easy to use. Employees can learn their way around them with little to no friction. Some companies do provide training videos and tutorials to walk users through the rather complex parts of the tools.
However, some parts might require more interactive training sessions to understand. While most large vendors will offer full training, smaller providers might not- though you pay less for the product. Assess whether your business will need any training before opting for a specific solution. You should also ask potential vendors whether you might need to pay extra for full training.
GRC Software Reviews
Spend time reading online reviews on the vendor and their services, but avoid limiting yourself by only looking at online reviews. No matter how confident the review are, they do not know your individual needs and cannot speak for you.
Once you are done choosing your company’s best-fit GRC software, the next step is to build on user buy-in.
You need to carefully launch and integrate the tools into your daily operations to ensure that there are little hiccups during implementation. If you need any help or advice with implementation, be sure to consult your GRC software vendor.
Evaluate GRC Solutions Against your Business Requirements
The only way to be certain that the GRC solution you choose meets the needs of the business is to thoroughly evaluate ALL available solutions against your business needs. Even though the process can be daunting, it is the only way to source the best GRC solution and minimize risk.
Find the Best GRC Software Solution for Your Business Needs in Less Time, with Olive
Olive takes the best process for finding the software you need, and makes it easy for you to collaborate with your stakeholders to identify and rank your requirements. With Olive, you can anonymously review all the GRC platforms and integrations available in the space, within the context of how these GRC platforms meet your evolving business needs. Olive takes this long list of vendors and boils it down to a shortlist that is assured to meet your needs. Searching for CRM reviews on Capterra or G2Crowd, can deliver biased results, but with Olive, we don’t charge vendors, so you can be confident that there is no bias on the shortlist.
With Olive, you can check out various project requirements ahead of time and easily filter out vendors based on these requirements. Easily filter out vendors who don’t meet your needs, and ensure the GRC software solution you choose addresses al your specific business concerns.
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