The foundations of risk and performance tracking
Would you purchase a home without inspecting it first? Are you willing to expose yourself to unknown risks? Of course not. So why are your business risks any different?
Risk is everywhere across an organization; in all departments and at all levels. To successfully mitigate these risks, there are several key foundational steps that all organizations should take to ensure that risk is adequately tracked and monitored.
One type of business risk? Vendor management.
Every vendor is different and the inherent risks are not equal. Some vendors are more important than others based on the type of service they provide or the number of services provided. It is the responsibility of the organization to define a process to assess each vendor relationship based on the risk they pose. Will the vendor have access to your customer information? If so, your inherent risk of the relationship is naturally high.
Another type of business risk? Lack of centralization and transparency.
Risk doesn’t just exist in a single department – it’s across every line of business in an organization. To mitigate their own risks, departments often conduct their own risk assessments and often rely on different naming conventions, processes or even methodology. Additionally, you may not have a full picture of your risk exposure because front-line managers and staff are busy with their own deliverables and risk management is lower on the to-do list. It’s incredibly challenging to aggregate and roll-up risk from different parts of the business to ensure complete organizational coverage.
Building a solid foundation is the first step
One of the essential duties of a business is to ensure they’re protected from internal and external risks. The financial and reputational penalties are simply too costly to ignore. Working with third parties adds another layer of risk to the equation. How can you ensure that your vendors share the same sense of urgency around risk to mitigate damage due to noncompliance?
Remember the home inspection analogy from earlier? Well, you’ll want to inspect the vendor just as you would your own home.
- Review your vendors’ information security practices and assess their cyber risk vulnerabilities
- Use residual risk assessments to log the findings of your inspection
With these two simple steps, you have built a foundation to decide if you are willing to work with this vendor or not and if their risks are manageable.
Once the vendor is a part of your network, you must continually monitor their continued success and SLA’s, if applicable. Again, much like your home, vendors also need regular upkeep. Develop an assessment to make sure they’re still providing value to you and ultimately, to your clients. If you find a something that needs adjusted, work with the vendor to correct it before the problem becomes to big to repair.
Additionally, you’re not going to be able to truly mitigate risk with every department assessing their own vendors using spreadsheets. A modern risk management solution that aggregates risk from across the organization is the only way you’ll truly be able to accurately access the potential ramifications due to noncompliance – both from employees and your third party vendors.
Solutions
To help you build these foundational elements for successful risk and performance tracking, companies are turning to state-of-the-art software solutions to cost-effectively mitigate these potential risks.
Vendor Risk Management
A vendor risk management solution, like Mitratech’s VendorInsight, automates, centralizes, and simplifies the contract and document management process. With tools like workflow, customizable contract alerts, document classification and management, teams gain transparency across the entire contract lifecycle and improve collaboration with stakeholders both internal and external.
Policy Management
A policy management solution like Mitratech’s PolicyHub saves time and improves efficiency, supporting effective policy management by automating and streamlining the processes involved, and removing the complexities and errors involved. So you can build an ethical and defensible compliance program.
Enterprise Risk Management
To gain true visibility into the risks threatening your organization, a next-generation solution for managing enterprise risk, like EnterpriseInsightTM, aggregates the risks from across your organization with unprecedented ease and insight.
Compliance & Obligations Management
A compliance and obligations management solution, like Mitratech’s CMO offering, uses a simple, intuitive interface to let employees and auditors be proactive in incident and audit management, including Volcker Rule obligations, controls, investigations, and non-conformance reporting. Easily report incidents, understand your obligations, and continuously improve your compliance performance.
Workflow Automation
A best-in-class workflow automation solution like Mitratech’s TAP is easy to adopt and use, and delivers nearly instant ROI as it allows form and process customization, reduces errors, accelerates workflows, builds collaboration, and provides automated archiving and e-signature integration, too.
