Compliance Offers Internal Stakeholder Value: Automation as Transmogrifier

Compliance offers internal stakeholder value even though your stakeholders don’t always see it. Anyone who’s ever been a fan of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons will remember Calvin’s transmogrifier, the cardboard box that magically transforms him into whatever he wants to be. Compliance automation is the way CISOs and CIOs magically transform compliance into internal stakeholder value.

Request a demo today to see how you can transform compliance into internal stakeholder value.

How to Define Stakeholders

Defining your stakeholders is the first step to showing them the value of compliance. You have internal stakeholders as well as external stakeholders. You have high level stakeholders, and you have those who need detailed information.

Internal stakeholders are often the ones you worry about most because they make decisions about your resources. If you provide them with clear information, they will value you more.

ZenGRC offers different levels of information presentation that allow you to give your stakeholders what they need, the way they need it. Being able to decompose your reporting by demographic makes you more effective and helps transform compliance into more than a requirement. Now, you can show your internal and external partners how your value affects them.

Board of Directors

Your Board needs to know the high level vision of your compliance to prove that they have done their due diligence. For companies that need to be SOX compliant, reporting to the Board has legal ramifications as well as business concerns.

With this in mind, you need a compliance tool that offers your Board a quick view of where you’re compliant, how you manage your vendors, and how this relates to the financial bottom line. If you’re currently managing this information on spreadsheets, making this information clear to your Board is time consuming.

ZenGRC offers high level views such as risk heat maps and a system of record dashboard that gives an easy to digest visual showing the percentages of controls finalized and mapped. When your Board wants to know what you’ve been doing to protect the company, this shows them exactly what they need in a way that they’ll understand.

Executives

You know as a member of the c-suite what your cohort needs. However, you’re also the technical one in the group. Your vice presidents, chief financial officers, and chief executive officers don’t need to understand the technical side of compliance. They need you to show them how compliance fits into their corporate strategies.

Your c-suite wants to know their risk, how you’re mitigating it, and how they can turn that into a financial asset. This means they don’t want the details of your definitions of the threats, vulnerabilities, and controls. They want the overview that shows how you’re protecting the organization and how that affects their strategies.

Automated tools allow you to use clean visuals that show the needed metrics. With ZenGRC’s comprehensive dashboard, you can show your c-suite the current risk profile and your controls for those risks. For example, the status bar graph offers your c-suite a color-coded visual of the tasks assigned, in progress, and completed. This provides the metrics needed to inform long-term business decisions.

Senior Management

These are your guys “in the weeds.” They’re helping you do the work to protect your organization. They’re the ones reviewing access logs. They’re the ones creating passwords. They’re the ones training your company’s employees.

These stakeholders need to be able to share information with you and with each other. If you’re collecting their reviews in documents and spreadsheets, you’re putting your information at risk. If two departments use different controls to protect the same asset, you have a compliance problem.

Automation allows you to store information in a single location while offering your internal stakeholders a comprehensive workflow that organizes information. ZenGRC’s tool for compliance increases stakeholder value by allowing your senior managers to see each other’s information so they can streamline their reviews and documentation. More importantly, you get to set access controls. This means that you decide not only what people see but also what they can change. With automation, you can destroy information silos, give people the information needed for their own tasks, and control your program.

Contributors

These stakeholders are everyone else in the organization who need to understand your compliance stance. They can be middle managers, specialists, auditors, or analysts. For example, your sales team may need to understand your vendor management stance to help sell the organization to a client.

With ZenGRC’s platform, your compliance offers stakeholder value by giving you an easy way to share the compliance posture and milestones. If your sales team needs to know your vendor risk tolerance, they can see it. If your business analyst is trying to streamline business processes, they need to see what controls you have in place before implementing a new application, such as payment processing. This means that ZenGRC’s single source of truth can give the information your stakeholders need to do their jobs more efficiently.

Automating Compliance Offers Internal Stakeholder Value

Your internal stakeholders need to know how you’re servicing them. To do that, you have to share information in ways they understand.

ZenGRC is not only easy for your internal stakeholders to use but also provides easy-to-digest information. Request a demo today.