Governance / Risk Management / Compliance

Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance or "GRC" has become an increasingly popularized term that reflects a new way in which organizations can adopt an integrated approach to these three areas.

That being said, this term is often positioned as a single business activity, when in reality, it includes multiple overlapping and related activities within an organization, e.g. internal audit, compliance programs like SOX, enterprise risk management (ERM), operational risk, incident management, etc.

Governance is the responsibility of senior executive management and focuses on creating organizational transparency by defining the mechanisms an organization uses to ensure that its constituents follow established processes and policies. A proper governance strategy implements systems to monitor and record current business activity, takes steps to ensure compliance with agreed policies, and provides for corrective action in cases where the rules have been ignored or misconstrued.

Risk Management is the process by which an organization sets the risk tolerance, identifies potential risks and prioritizes the tolerance for risk based on the organization’s business objectives. Risk Management leverages internal controls to manage and mitigate risk throughout the organization.

Compliance is the process that records and monitors the policies, procedures and controls needed to enable compliance with legislative or industry mandates as well as internal policies.

As far as OPTIMA is concerned, within the GRC realm, it is very important to realize that if the first one (Governance) is not in place, the second two (Risk Management and Compliance) become irrelevant and their likelihood of being achieved is slim.

Working on the same logic, if second one (Risk Management) is not in place then achieving Compliance becomes irrelevant and probably cannot be meaningfully achieved. This is the reason the acronym is designed as GRC and not other combinations. Governance, Risk, and Compliance are highly related but distinct activities that solve different problems for different sets of constituents of an organization.

Through its vast level of subject matter expertise, OPTIMA provides superior governance, risk management and compliance consulting service to businesses of all sizes.

For a free one hour consultation to learn more about how and OPTIMA’s governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) consultingcan benefit your business, call OPTIMA now at 905 602 4435!