Engaging the front office in risk management
Effective risk management needs everyone to play their part – both the back office (such as CISO, CRO, Privacy, Procurement, Audit) and the front office (business and the wider business ecosystem, such as partners, vendors etc.).
The back office provides policy, guidance, standards, specialist services (such as risk assessment), monitoring, auditing and reporting. As such, it needs robust integrated risk management (IRM) technology to capture, centralize, automate, and quantify risks across the organization. Most importantly, the IRM technology should provide analytics, dashboarding and reporting capabilities.
The front office is responsible for delivering business outcomes and achieving strategic targets and has visibility of many of the risks, incidents, issues, non-compliances etc. which could compromise those efforts. Working together, the front office and back office can manage risk effectively and also paint an overall picture of risk and compliance status for stakeholders.
While the specialist back office needs sophisticated risk management technology (and expects to be trained in it) the front office are occasional users of risk management technology and want simple intuitive interactions with risk management technology without the need for specific training.
The optimum way to engage the front office is through simple, customizable, easy to use web forms for adding and updating data to the IRM system, which then integrates seamlessly with back office processes.
Examples of front office web forms include:
- Logging of incidents and issues
- Compliance assessment
- Data privacy impact assessments
- Vendor assurance
To keep up with rapidly changing risk landscape, risk management technology must be agile to respond quickly to new risks, regulations, compliance mandates etc. This means that users of risk management technology need to be able to configure their back office and front office capabilities quickly and easily without the need for custom coding or lengthy consultancy contracts.
“GRC done right minimizes its impact on the business while still maintaining insight and control of risk across the business. GRC should be intuitive to the frontlines of business and GRC technology should provide the right information in a way that works for the frontlines,” GRC Analyst, Michael Rasmussen.
Acuity’s STREAM Integrated Risk Manager platform provides APIs and intuitive, customized webforms for the front office to quickly and easily interact with risk management technology. Combined with STREAM’s advanced analytics, dashboards and reporting for the back office, they provide a market-leading, agile, integrated risk management solution. To learn more please contact the Acuity Risk Management team today!