On November 11, I was a speaker on a webcast sponsored by CA and
Business Finance Magazine. A replay of the webcast is
available here (once you register, you'll be brought immediately to a page where you can launch the replay).
This webcast focused on the results of a survey that CA and
Business Finance recently conducted with the magazine's readers. We surveyed these finance executives (CFOs, VPs of Finance, etc) to understand their primary business drivers, organizational structure, and requirements in the area of GRC. We also learned some interesting insights about the benefits that they had achieved through their unified GRC efforts, as well as the challenges that they faced.
Here is just a brief snapshot of some of the findings of this survey:
Risk and Compliance (R&C) are critically important to financial executives.
Over 90% rated it as "very high," and over half rated it as their highest priority.
- Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) is still the most impactful regulation.
- R&C programs overwhelmingly exist at the corporate level, rather than the Business Unit level
- Most companies still use "home-grown" approaches, such as spreadsheets, internally-developed software, and the like.
The benefits of a formal, unified R&C program are real, and consistent:
> Easier compliance
> Reduced risk
> Reduced costs through automation
The second part of the webcast focused on predictions and thoughts about what we expect to see as key GRC trends in 2009. There were some general trends that I discussed, but also specific activities in Risk Management that I expect will occur over the next year. These relate to the emerging risk-based evaluations announced by Standard & Poor's, as well as movement toward ISO 27005:2008.
Watch our blog in the coming weeks for more insights on our predictions for 2009.
If you'd like to hear the full recap of results of the Business Finance survey and highlights of our predictions for 2009, I encourage you to view a replay of the webcast. Also, feel free to share your thoughts, comments, questions and feedback right here in the comments to this post.