Policies, rules, procedures: achieving good governance when you're faced with an ever-increasing list of regulatory and legislative mandates is a major headache for most organisations.

In an increasingly process-driven environment, how can managers be sure that employees fully understand what is expected of them and put it into action in their day-to-day working lives? In other words, how can they tackle compliance risk management?

It's a tricky one. Organisations could employ a team of compliance auditors to create policies, communicate them and then stand over employees, checking that every box is ticked and no short-cuts are taken. But how much would that cost and what might be the effect on company morale?

Logicalis has an answer: its Iconium corporate compliance portal automates many of the processes that surround the creation, communication, enforcement and monitoring of policies.

Logicalis' Governance, Risk and Compliance Engine, or GRACE for short, enables organisations to create a ‘policy portal' for use by employees and their managers, explains Chris Gabriel, marketing and solutions director at Logicalis.

Employees use that portal to receive and view policies and procedures by job function or role. They can acknowledge receipt of policy updates there, submit their declaration that they fully understand them, and take regular tests to demonstrate their continued understanding.

Managers, meanwhile, use the portal to create and distribute policies to their teams and to receive reports on who has read them, who's acknowledged them and who's taken those tests. This information is retained by the system, creating an audit trail that the organisation can produce as evidence of its attention to corporate governance.

"One of the hardest things about governance for any company executive is knowing what goes on behind the scenes within their organisation. Putting watertight policies in place is all very well, but you need to be confident that they are adopted and enforced at every level," he says.

It's not just a matter of satisfying the demands of regulatory enforcement and compliance, he adds - GRACE, previously known as Iconium Policy Manager, can also be used for internal improvements, ensuring that when new business processes are introduced and existing ones streamlined in the interests of greater efficiency, the way employees complete tasks changes, too.

"A perfect example is an IT department seeking ITIL compliance. GRACE can be used to ensure that staff know exactly the right way to go about provisioning a new server or upgrading desktop operating systems and stick to it rigidly every time," he says. Equally, it can be used to ensure that warehouse staff follow new health and safety guidelines or that customer service staff clearly communicate full terms and conditions of purchase to prospective customers who ring the call centre.

"Governance is all about deciding what ‘best practice' means for you as a business and giving your employees a way to live up to the standards you set, whatever position they hold in your business. GRACE can help you do that," says Gabriel.

Version 5 of GRACE is now available - see http://uk.logicalis.com/business_issues/governance_grace.asp for more details.

Your Comments and Questions

Alan Crean, 2 months ago

4 min video on creating an ITIL Process Master on www.ProcessMaster.com

Jeff Wells, 3 months ago

This sounds like a good idea. Is the policy portal backed up with educational initiatives too to support employees during major policy updates/changes?

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