11 Key Ingredients of an effective GRC System: Reporting

Part 9: Reporting

Reporting is a critical element of Risk and Compliance Management; it is the output upon which decisions are made. Ensuring that your reports are of the highest quality, based upon live data and easily accessible is therefore a fundamental basis of effective risk management decision making.

The Fundamentals of Reporting:

• When looking at your reports it should be immediately clear how well your risk management is performing and highlight the areas that need prioritising.
• All the information that you need to measure your performance against your key objectives should be included.
• Regularly review and evaluate the reporting process as any delays, issues or inaccuracies will create barriers to your organisation’s progress.

Consider our 5 Golden Rules for Reporting…

1. Reports based on live data: On-demand or cloud-based solutions ensure that your data is live, and not based on an historic spreadsheet.
2. Automated reports: Reporting (and dashboard) tools are essential for effective reporting and analysis of risk data. By setting up automated reports, you can be sure that all the necessary people receive an update when it requires their attention.
   
   Scheduling an automated report
   
   
3. Easily create custom reports: Ensure your system gives you enough flexibility to create and customise a wide variety of reports in a simple, easy to use way.
4. Reports should be able to aggregate data: If your organisation is using multiple scoring schemes for risks, business units or projects, your reports need to reflect this. You should be able to aggregate these weightings together in order to provide a top level view and also drill down into the underlying risk values.
5. Share reports with colleagues: While the report itself may be created in isolation, reporting is very much a collaborative process; your reports must therefore be accessible and immediately available to those who need it. This could include; your team, managers and board members.