Why Managing Your Risk Assessments with ComplianceBridge is Better Than What You are Doing Now

Risk. It’s difficult to imagine one word has such as impact on our behavior and mindset.

The word encompasses and conjures many implications; the potential for harm; that vigilance is required; that all might be not quiet on the Western front (so to speak). At the other extreme end of the spectrum, what may be considered the Homer Simpson “Doh!” world of risk; not knowing or understanding what risk means for any organization until it occurs, could be just as disastrous as not doing anything to manage and mitigate risk.

Risk weighs on our psyches.  Where is the next major disaster going to occur, when will we face another emergency, and what will we have to do to mitigate this risk…?  How will we prevent this from happening again?

As you can imagine, that one word, with its myriad of implications, has affected the way enterprises conduct their day-to-day operations.  Individuals such as Compliance Officers, Risk Managers, et al are professionals dedicated to seeking out and mitigating risks, but only when these roles are present in an organization. You’d be surprised how many organizations don’t have dedicated individuals that fill these roles.  Most wear multiple hats.  Policies, oversight, procedures, processes, firewalls, and numerous activities and strategies are put into place to counter this omnipresent concept; Risk.

However, despite all the efforts to mitigated and reduce risk, it can never fully be eliminated. The term itself implies a nebulous characteristic- you never really know who, what, when, where, or why certain adverse events may occur- unless your name happens to be Nostradomous. The best an organization can do, is prepare itself with the best and most flexible tools the marketplace can offer, in order to minimize organizational risk and respond to an ever changing business environment.

Ultimately, an organization wants to gain wisdom into proper mitigation and prevention of risk.  Wisdom is predicated on knowledge of what is happening within the organization.  And of course, knowledge cannot be derived in the absence of data.  Ultimately, the timely collection of relevant data, will allow an organization the knowledge-of and wisdom-of-how-to properly manage risk.

When ComplianceBridge teamed up with a career Compliance officer and Risk Management professional, there was a feeling that the marketplace had not evolved to meet the demands of managing compliance and risk in a dynamic organization in a time sensitive manner.

Some tools were comprehensive and complete, but inflexible, laborious, and time consuming to adopt. Other tools were prohibitively expensive, and not realistic to meet the budget of a nimble, flexible and competitive organization; or required too many internal resources to implement within the organization. Many lacked the flexibility to meet the changing needs of various organizations.

It became clear that the marketplace was in need of a simple, quick to implement, cost-effective, yet flexible and powerful tool.  That led ComplianceBridge to build its new ‘Risk, Audits, and Assessments Management Solution’.

Simple. Intuitive. Powerful. Cost Effective. Efficient.

The tool was designed to allow Compliance Officers and Risk Managers to proactively manage risk across any industry or vertical. (Healthcare, Finance, Banking, Manufacturing, Consulting, etc). It allows users to conduct risk assessments, send out questionnaires, audit surveys, or any other customized/tailored question sets that would be useful to gather information from across the organization, whether it’s the c-suite or management team, front-line staff, or office gerbil.  These question sets can be distributed electronically to the grass roots of an organization, to get feedback and information from the individuals who are tangent to the operations in question – where risk most always is identified – in the trenches.  Or on the gerbil wheel.

Since no two organizations are the same, a risk tool needs the flexibility to allow the question set to fill all the gaps unique to the organization.  Question sets can come with a variety of answer types – multiple-choice, yes/no, written, or numeric.  Questions can be weighted, categorized, and divided by section. Others questions can be based on condition of previous questions and answers to better drill down and understand responses.

Information is only valuable if it is turned into knowledge.  The inputs need to be organized and presented to tell a story- so that it is clear what needs to be done to address and mitigate any areas of risk.  Dashboards and reports will show up-to-the-minute data so you can see your Risk score for any level of the organization — globally, by department, team, business segment, or even individual.  Reports can also be run laterally across the organization, to show how a certain category or section of questions are answered across various levels in the organization.

It is no secret that specialized cloud services have been gaining relevance in the last decade and a half. The cloud model provides a number of key advantages to organizations, which gives a competitive and functional edge to companies who adopt these services.   Cloud hosted services allow all information, including all current and previous risk assessments, answers, reports, and user information to be stored in one location.  Additionally, cloud-based solutions allow the customer to focus on their business rather than worry about security, network

By contrast, excel spreadsheets can easily be lost, and email attachments are unreliable at best.  Multiple Excel inputs & edits can turn to multiple, un-manageable versions.

On a cloud hosted tool, such as ComplianceBridge, one live version, with an archive of all historical versions, are stored and available at any time and instantly.

Electronic groupings can be created to ensure data collected by users applies to the appropriate parts of the organization. When a Risk Assessment is blasted out to the organization, the tool will do the work of grouping the results. Notifications will go out to users, based upon their group and access level, to prompt them to provide responses. Users may be given the ability to delegate questions, so the individuals most knowledgeable about the Risk questions ultimately provide the best answer. And, as always, scheduled reminders can be sent to remind users into providing prompt feedback.

In the current social and legal marketplace, it is imperative that organizations do their due diligence with regards to Risk Management. The days of ‘shake it off and get back to work’, have been replaced by ‘don’t speak unless you are prompted by your lawyer’.  The social culture has moved from ‘get the damn job done’, to ‘I hope I didn’t offend your feelings’.  In this era, companies are seen to have the social and moral responsibility to prove they took all the proper precautions to reduce and mitigate Risk in their organization.

It was with those insights, and many more, that ComplianceBridge is thrilled to take its cutting-edge, industry unique, tool to the greater marketplace.

Additionally, our knowledgeable team of experts loves to speak with people, from a variety of industries and work cultures, to better understand their world and how they manage Risk. We feel that everybody has a story that can make us more knowledgeable about the world of Risk Management, and hopefully we have the expertise to teach you a thing or two as well.

Oh, and as an additional perk, the next 10 organizations who reach out to us, will receive 33% of the first year of the ComplianceBridge Risk, Audit, and Assessment services- should they end up purchasing the services.  To be considered for the discount, just tell us you came to us to be ‘Risk-free for 16’.

To a productive and risk free ’16