
Written by GRC Practice Director, Alex Hollis
For our Governance Risk and Compliance Software Practice Director’s latest webinar: ‘How to integrate Business Risk and IT Risk’, Alex Hollis uses the infographic (below) to show how taking an integrated risk management (IRM) approach and connecting EGRC and IT GRC software, allows you to have more joined-up, in-depth conversation within your organization, since you have greater visibility over the relationships.
Alex encourages organizations to take an integrated risk management approach, which integrates EGRC and IT GRC, because of the value you can derive from it, and the greater protection it affords an organization. To illustrate this, we have decided to break down the graphic into bite-size blogs giving you an in-depth analysis into Integrating Business Risk and IT Risk. Follow along on this 8 part series to broaden your understanding on bridging the gap between EGRC and IT GRC…
Read the first of our Integration Risk Management Blogs to learn about the challenges of business silos and how to integrate pillars to overcome them.
The world is driving towards the acquisition of data; if you have enough data, you can unveil the all-important sales and marketing opportunities that enable business growth or reveal the inefficiencies that can be overcome to boost your competitiveness. However, with data must come data privacy solutions.
In a study by McKinsey, 80% of senior executives said that effective coordination across their business functions was crucial for growth, and yet, just 25% said they were ‘effective at sharing knowledge across boundaries’.
The problem is that data is often trapped in silos that exist across different systems, business units and organizational functions, which makes it hard to unlock that actionable insight.

80% of organizations report high or moderate degrees of data silos (D&B)
It’s a common issue that occurs within different areas of your business, where departments or teams start to operate in isolation and fail to communicate effectively. Ultimately productivity suffers as you lose organizational flow, so activities or data are duplicated, your processes can’t run smoothly, and your staff become frustrated and demoralized. Integrated risk management can prevent this result.

Integrate the pillars
Creating the strong foundations on which to grow and remain competitive requires you to accept and embrace the silos that your business operates with. Ultimately, the pillars of your business are working toward a mutually agreed goal. All you need to do is figure out where and how you can integrate those pillars to facilitate better information sharing with integrated risk management software. Now, they can maintain that important separation, while sharing commonality and driving towards the end result in a cohesive manner.