It's been a full year since we created the GRC blog here at CA. It's been an exciting year, not only in the rapidly expanding GRC market but also here at CA, too. I thought the first anniversary warranted at least some thoughts on our first year.

The GRC market has continued to grow over the past year, both in terms of customer adoption, and in terms of analyst recognition. Even though most analysts differ in some respects as to the exact structure and taxonomy of the market, there is general agreement that this is an important and compelling market, and that it helps to solve some very important challenges that exist today. Basically, I think the days of "GRC is a fad" are over.

As we all know, the financial crisis dominated the news of the past year (in fact, today also marks the anniversary of the initial collapse), but especially around the turn of the year. This situation certainly brought home the importance of more effective risk management as well as compliance, particularly in light of some additional regulations that will certainly come along in the future. But, the GRC market was increasing in strength and credibility before the crisis came, simply because its business benefits are so compelling. But, at minimum, the crisis served as a "proof point" of the catastrophic impacts of bad risk management.

It's been a reasonably good year also at CA. We have weathered the financial storm much better than many companies our size, and things look very promising as we come out of this financial downturn.

The blog has done very well, and quite frankly, has exceeded our expectations in terms of viewership and level of activity. It is one of the most popular blogs at CA with a healthy and continuing amount of traffic each month.

There were a few posts that seemed to generate a high degree of interest. And, not surprisingly, many of these posts dealt in some way with the financial crisis, and how it might change risk and compliance moving forward. Here are the top visited blogs on our site over the past year:

1. Accountants Point Fingers at Failed Corporate Governance as the Cause of the Financial Crisis
2. Dilbert on Risk Management: What's Your Punch Line?
3. Financial Crisis: Lessons in Risk Management
4. Financial Crisis: What Areas of Risk Management Actually Failed
5. KRIs and KPIs: The Alphabet Soup Approach to Risk Management

I'm very pleased that three of my posts were among the top five most visited ones, but somewhat chagrined that I was edged out by Dilbert. Next year, I'm gonna beat him! (The fact that risk management made it into the Dilbert comic strip tells you just how relevant and top-of-mind this topic has been this past year.)

A special shout-out to Christine Needles, who is our driving force behind continuing to get interesting content on our blog. We both hope that you have found it useful, and we welcome any insight or comments that you have, either on the GRC market or on the blog itself. We're looking forward to another exciting year!


*Photo used under Creative Commons License courtesy of Sandra.