Jack of All Trades

I don’t know about you, but I hate the “spork”. That mutated plastic utensil that purports to serve as both a spoon and a fork? In reality, it does neither the job of the spoon or the fork very well, and no one would choose a spork if given the option of a stand-along spoon and fork.

Ever wonder why we don’t have flying cars? Pay attention the next time you have a long trip in your aircraft from the terminal to the runway. Smooth ride? Fast? Not exactly. It’s bumpy, awkward, slow. At 30,000 feet, however, that “purpose-built” design performs pretty well. Conversely, as Thelma and Louise discovered, cars make lousy airplanes.

Ever use the scissors on your Swiss Army Knife? Open a bottle of wine with its corkscrew? I think I tore ligaments in my fingers trying to use the screwdriver head once. Given a choice, who would choose the Swiss Army Knife over a pair of scissors, a wine opener, or an actual screwdriver? In life, we always choose the purpose-built tool. It’s common sense.

We see this all the time here at Prevalent. We’re all about Third-Party Risk Management (and second and fourth-party risk as well, but we’ll get to that in another blog…) We think about it every day, all day. How to do it better, more efficiently, more effectively. Focusing on that one area fills our days pretty easily, because, like any other complex area of expertise, there’s a lot to it. There was a time when the country doctor set the broken bone in your arm and removed your appendix, but as medicine became more complex and sophisticated, the need for more and more specialists made sense: “purpose-built physicians” in the language of our business.

Many of our customers and would-be customers use, or consider using, GRC platforms when confronted with the Third-Party Risk Management challenge, and most of them eventually arrive at the same conclusion: it’s very hard to open a bottle of wine with that Swiss Army Knife. GRC platforms simply aren’t built to serve the Third-Party Risk Management task. You can do it that way, but there are far better ways to accomplish the mission.

So, if you’re struggling with Third-Party Risk Management and are attempting to use GRC or considering a GRC platform, give us a call and let us show you the benefits of having a specialist handle your open heart surgery.