Since the practice of governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) was introduced nearly two decades ago, enterprises have devoted a great deal of time and resources to incorporating it into their organizations. And for good reason.
But of the dozen activities receiving those resources – from regulatory analysis to incident response – one has the potential to bring organizations through the home stretch to total compliance. That one activity is End-user training and digital adoption. Even when every other aspect of enterprises’ GRC efforts work like a well-oiled machine, end users still need to know and execute compliant processes in their enterprise software. This is where a digital adoption platform (DAP) can help.
Read on to learn why this emerging digital adoption solution has a place in the GRC technology stack and how DAP can help enterprises avoid the high cost of non-compliance.
The obstacles to achieving consistent GRC compliance
GRC refers to the “strategy for managing an organization’s overall governance, enterprise risk management and compliance with regulations. [It is] a structured approach to aligning IT with business objectives, while effectively managing risk and meeting compliance requirements.” As a discipline full of experts, frameworks, and solutions, GRC aims to help organizations avoid the significant consequences on non-compliance:
- Hefty fines and penalties from a range of external actors
- The loss of trust and confidence from stakeholders, vendors, and customers
- Missed deadlines and missed business opportunities when organizations struggle to implement new regulatory requirements efficiently
And while the stakes are high, the rules of the game are complex and ever-changing:
- Tax, security, and consumer protection regulations are always evolving.
- Multinational enterprises must juggle a multitude of varying regional regulations.
- With every merger and acquisition, enterprises must digest and document new sets of regulatory requirements.
- Infrequent processes that are subject to critical regulations suffer from rusty or lost institutional knowledge or business process documentation that is out-of-date.
- The persistent challenge of slow or failed user adoption becomes a GRC concern when end users incorrectly execute business processes in their enterprise software that impact enterprise compliance.
This web of high-stakes requirements is nothing short of a regulatory minefield. And it requires GRC experts to create, source, and implement solutions that are up to the task of ensuring enterprise-wide compliance.
A world of GRC solutions – but a persistent compliance gap
For every GRC framework or methodology, there is a technology solution that promises to optimize risk management and mitigation. This has resulted in a world of enterprise software that automates capturing and mapping regulatory requirements. These requirements include application controls and processes, auditing process adherence, and identifying gaps in compliance, among many other capabilities.
Often, these solutions can get enterprises the majority of the way to compliance. But what accounts for the shortfall? For many enterprise GRC teams, it is the acceptance of an inevitable, statistically significant enterprise software user error rate. The thinking is: No matter how up-to-date their regulatory library is, no matter how much governance and risk mitigation is built into software processes, there will always be the components that rely on end users. And to err is human.
But this thinking is limited – and costly. To revise it, GRC efforts should tap into a broader group of stakeholders – including training and support staff and internal subject matter experts.
Training teams can offer insight into the methodologies and tools for achieving and sustaining enterprise-wide digital adoption – which, when successful, significantly reduces end user error rates. Meanwhile, internal subject matter experts – those employees who are experts in an organization’s processes and products – can be utilized to widely distribute the evolving regulatory requirements and their subsequent business process changes. This works to foster compliance from the ground up.
When end users are supported to quickly adopt and accurately execute business processes that are frequently altered by new regulatory requirements, GRC efforts increase their value. Meaning enterprises can now entertain the question: What would we save if we could reduce the end user error rate, and therefore non-compliance rate, by even a few percentage points?
Digital adoption platforms join the stack and work on closing the gap
A digital adoption platform is software that runs on top of the enterprise application or system in which end users need training and support, providing on-demand process instructions. They can strengthen GRC efforts in several ways:
- The step-by-step, in-application guides enable error-free process execution by end users. This, therefore, increases reliable regulatory compliance. No need to trust in the user’s memory or rely on potentially out-of-date manuals for accurate business process workflow completion.
- Guide development is fast and easy. DAPs like OnScreen work to streamline the information pipeline from the GRC teams, to the subject matter experts creating the guides, to the end users engaging the guides as they work. This eliminates steps in the process of implementing regulatory changes, as well as wait time between each step, such as waiting to schedule training. So as regulations evolve, they can be quickly updated and followed. Compliant business process standards are documented, distributed, and available for user access as fast as it takes to record the workflow (usually a matter of minutes).
- A digital adoption platform also has the potential to positively impact the allocation of human capital resources for GRC. With greater confidence and demonstrated competence in end-user process adherence, the time spent by management, IT, and GRC teams in auditing high-risk and critical business processes for compliance will decrease. This provides greater freedom for these employees to tackle more value-added projects.
OnScreen is the agile digital adoption platform for SAP and web-based enterprise applications that boosts process efficiency and employee productivity by empowering any user to become a super user. Book a Demo to learn the other ways DAPs can save your enterprise money through successful digital adoption.