Governance Process: Tips To Developing a Structured GRC Approach

Governance processes started to gain traction as a response to the drawbacks of traditional siloed security systems that tend to fall apart as you scale. 

Before you know it, you have too many things on your plate—meeting stakeholder expectations, complying with regulations, and following through on the business’s principles. Juggling these all at once may work in harmony at the start. But if you drop one ball, the entire flow is disturbed. This is why you should adopt a structured approach to governing your processes. 

In this article, we will learn about governance processes, their importance, and how to create one. 

What is a governance process?

Governance process is a framework consisting of policies, timelines, practices, roles, and regulations surrounding your business. The process helps you achieve your objectives, measure performance, and operationalize existing structures. 

Governance structures aim to add efficiency to existing workflows, define the interaction between roles, and streamline the execution responsibilities. 

Data governance is not an option; it is a fundamental requirement for successful data management and ensuring data quality, compliance, and security. – Girish Redekar, CEO of Sprinto and GRC expert

Key drivers of governance processes

Over the years, organization structure, processes, and workflows have changed, driving the need for better governance. Three factors behind this change include:

• To facilitate uninterrupted growth: Customers, investors, stakeholders, and business partners expect robust services and healthy higher returns. Businesses have to cater to these without breaking internal processes. To balance these needs, governance processes are becoming key growth enablers. 
• Another day, another regulation: As you expand into new territories and scale your business, more regulatory obligations apply, adding to the complexity of internal processes. This disrupts existing processes, driving the need for a structured approach. 
• The need for all-around visibility: Board members are expected to oversee major decisions regarding compliance obligations, risk management, and new initiatives. They need 360-degree visibility into these processes and set the tone for the organization’s values and strategies.

How to establish a governance process structure

Setting up a governance structure, especially from scratch, requires more work than meets the eye. Having helped hundreds of companies set up effective governance workflows, here are our takeaways on what goes into making efficient processes. 

Consider the scope of governance process

Select a framework that resonates with your business objectives to start your governance program. Governance models generally come as part of the GRC (Governance, Risk, Compliance) frameworks or as separate programs. 

If you already have effective risk and compliance management processes, a standalone governance solution may be added on. If you are building from scratch, we recommend opting for a tool that combines all three. 

Understand your governance requirements

In addition to the model, you should consider the scope of your business. This is based on your industry, location, means of operation, stakeholder commitments, most importantly the existing status of governance processes; the maturity model. This will help you know where to focus and what to prioritize. 

Identify applicable regulations 

If you process sensitive data, one or more regulations may apply. For example, if you process healthcare records, you are liable to HIPAA. If you process payment cards, PCI DSS is mandatory. If you collect PII (personally identifiable information) of EU citizens for business purposes, GDPR is mandatory. 

Your governance processes should align with the requirements of the applicable compliance regulations. For example, compliance frameworks like ISO 27001, NIST 800 53 have role based access control based in its checklist. 

If either of these or a similar privacy and data governance framework applies to your organization, the governance processes should also be set up in a way that complies with the catalog of controls and practices set forth by them. 

Manage roles and responsibilities

You can’t have processes up and running without anyone knowing the whats, hows, and whens of executing them. When we talk about roles and responsibilities of a governance structure, it’s not just your employees. All business consultants, third party service providers, stakeholders, and even upper management should have adequate clarity into the part they play. 

Smaller companies and startups generally outsource their GRC requirements to external consultants as an in-house team can be cost intensive. Medium sized companies and enterprises usually hire an internal team consisting of an infosec officer, data protection officer, risk analyst, internal auditors, and more. 

Your policies should define who takes the lead, who has veto rights, who makes changes, who resolves conflicts, and so on. Getting everyone on board from the beginning helps in ensuring transparency and accountability throughout the governance lifecycle. 

Develop policies and procedures

Business governance policies should outline key governance objectives. Ensure that everyone involved in the governance processes understands and acknowledges your policies. 

Process policies should be developed around the roles and responsibilities, third party risk management, risk management strategies, employee training, internal and external communications, improvement methodologies, and employee training programs. 

Download your free third-party risk management template

Ensure risk and change management

Governance models consist of components like global operational infrastructures, legal liabilities, auditing activities, and control functions. All these components are complex in nature and add new risks like security threats to your operational environment. 

Your governance processes should be built to manage these risks on time to minimize incidents and ensure business continuity. For example, if you have a lot of external stakeholders, third party risk management is critical for you. 

In addition to risks, new processes and technologies are continuously being added to existing workflows. Develop a change management plan to adopt these changes as they occur. Design a matrix to address design responsibilities and issues escalation. 

Decoupling change management from compliance is risky. Without adherence to best practices, code changes can weaken security and reduce infra-ops effectiveness. Disorganized code approvals and project tracking jeopardize system integrity and compliance.

Sprinto provides tools to systematize and accelerate change management, aligning with risk thresholds and compliance. You can perform code-level changes, including CI branches and approvals, ensuring security best practices tailored to your oversight needs. Get a demo now. 

Implement and measure the processes

Once you developed the processes and plans, time to put them to action. Your implementation strategy should include GRC metrics to measure the effectiveness of your processes and map governance requirements to business critical functions. 

While designing the implementation plan, prioritize the critical processes and set timelines for ongoing projects. Set up a system to evaluate changes, track progress, and address issues related to risks. 

Implementing a governance program can take months, even years to implement if done manually. You can use a GRC tool to streamline the process and launch faster. 

Why develop a governance process? Key advantages and benefits

Effective governance processes help achieve transparency, ensure accountability, and facilitate sound decision-making. Here are three ways it can benefit your organization: 

• Better transparency: One key challenge burdening upper management and board members is translating their policies and business principles into practice. Governance processes address these issues by setting a predefined system that governs roles, accountabilities, responsibilities, data flow, security practices, regulations, and other components. This adds harmony to the end-to-end system.
• Enhanced visibility: Governance processes help management and decision makers track progress of projects, policies, and principles from a single, non-siloed system. Moreover, authorities should have deep insight into risk management and decision making processes. 

A governance model helps them follow up by specifying the internal processes’ who, what, when, and why. 

• Better coordination: As you scale, your internal processes become more complex. Without an effective communication system in place, managing business components can be challenging. 

Governance processes harmonize compliance, legal, stakeholder requirements, and more by breaking away siloed systems.

Governance process operating structure

A governance operating structure, on a high level is composed of the responsibilities, IT infrastructure, responsibilities, and their sub components. These are connected by workflows, processes, reporting systems – the nuts and bolts of your operating structure. 

The board and management decides how it will be implemented. In practice, the hierarchy usually looks like this: 

• Structure: Your reporting processes and committee structure 
• Oversight responsibilities: Board oversight, management accountability, and committee 
• Infrastructure: Policies and procedures, reporting and communication, and technology 

Your governance process should have an organized structure for risk management, operations, and reporting processes. The goal is to bridge the gap between siloed systems and operational realities. 

Still setting up processes from scratch?

Managing end-to-end governance processes manually leaves a lot of gaps and room for improvement. This is especially true for small businesses that don’t have a structured framework around their processes. GRC Tools like Sprinto combine governance, risk, and security compliance and enable you to centralize and automate your data governance process. Using this tool, you can:

• Streamline and automate workflows around policies, data audit readiness, and security compliance management.
• Centralize people-management activities so you can mark all your compliance and audit checkboxes with little to no manual intervention 
• Setup custom role based access control privileges for all assets based on roles and level of risk
• Equips you with tools to set up, systematize, and accelerate change management in a way that aligns with your risk and compliance requirements
• Use industry benchmarks to score risks for critical assets and surfaces vulnerabilities and non-compliant activities 

Explore Sprinto to discover how we accelerate your journey toward effective governance implementation.

FAQs

What are the four components of governance?

The four components of governance are people, policies, process, purpose, and performance. These serve as the foundational principles for effective business operation. 

What are the four steps of governance?

The four steps of IT governance include aligning your business goals with security objectives, managing and mitigating risks, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements, and continuously monitoring the infrastructure to improve security resilience. 

Who is responsible for overseeing the governance process?

The board of directors is primarily responsible for overseeing the governance process. It consists of internal members, the executive team, and various committees.