Imagine building a product for your organization. You start off with the design team, without involving the manufacturing team. The manufacturing team makes the product with lot of hesitation as the design passed onto them is not conducive to make a real product with ease. All this while, the sales and marketing team does not have a hint of what is going on. When the product finally arrives in the market, there are no real buyers. The reason? Practicing siloed approach all through the product life cycle. With fierce competition, there is an evolution from push marketing strategies to pull strategies. In such a backdrop, it is necessary to break the silos and adopt an integrated strategy.

Applying the above described siloed approach to risk management at organizations, one can reflect upon similar issues. First of all, siloed approaches are very costly, time consuming and involve lot of effort. It gives no transparency to the higher management into the metrics. Even if metrics are well defined, the other teams and subsequently the higher management cannot make a sense of what they actually mean unless the metrics are all on the same unified scale, which is most likely not in the case of siloed approaches.

One of the core tenets of Integrated Risk Management (IRM)/Enterprise Governance Risk Compliance (EGRC) is to test once and comply many. An organization may face multiple regulators or other external bodies each coming up with their own laws and regulations. An integrated approach makes sure these regulatory requirements are rationalized and appropriate controls are deployed that culminates in testing least number of times and complying with many regulations simultaneously. This saves costs, time and effort on a large scale. Integrated Risk Management also gathers data from multiple sources such as legacy systems. These legacy systems are usually inflexible and not technologically sophisticated as some of the modern risk management technology platforms such as RSA Archer. The data drawn from multiple sources will enable an organization to detect patterns that haven’t been detected ever because the data was all scattered all through this while. The synergies achieved of integration are much more. A rationalized and unified scale of risk ratings across the business units indicates same efficacy to the organization without any score for multiple interpretations. Another critical piece is achieved through integrated approach – sharing risk information between various teams.

Siloed risk management practices are usually witnessed at organizations that grow rapidly. When they had started, each unit within the organization would have grown organically defining its own risk management framework. These business units have a certain degree of autonomy and over time are completely boxed in their world. When many such groups are working for an organization without really interacting among themselves, Integrated Risk Management helps to unify the processes, procedures, ratings and interpretations.

We, at Integrade solutions help organizations in identifying potential areas of integration with respect to their risk management programs. From partnering with organizations on developing risk management frameworks, developing policies and procedures, to technology implementation on platforms such as RSA Archer, we provide end-to-end best in class services.