Recently BPS did an analysis of the top five, most sought after features for an audit and compliance system. This was based on the last 100 product demonstrations conducted by our presales engineering team.
The sample of companies ranged from large financial institutions to energy to healthcare and government. Here is what these companies demanded to see the most in a software demonstration:
1. Visibility into control coverage and risk status across the enterprise. This is less of a reporting request as it is a need for rich, high integrity data. These views need to be context sensitive, secure, stochastic and remain meaningful even after changes in the company’s hierarchical or organization structure.
2. Demonstrate the ability to run the company’s existing audit and compliance processes without customization to the software. This includes adding additional fields, steps, tests, workflows and hierarchical structure and reports.
3. Show Sarbanes Oxley and Audit integration. Typically this means secure and entitled sharing of control test results and managing issues workflows between Sox and Audit projects
4. Demonstrate flexible reporting and management dashboards
5. Demonstrate how to involve non-risk managers (business users) more closely through intelligent use of notifications and issue and action tracking.
Enterprise views of risk and integration therefore seem to remain at the forefront of everyone’s consideration. Efficiency and accountability are also top value points. Most of the organizations are not new to software; however, the data suggests that companies have struggled with the issues for sometime. Many pundits see these considerations almost as a thing of the past pointing to new and exiting leaps and bounds in GRC technology and knowledge offerings. For the time being, however, it seems that focusing on the real basics of efficiency, accountability and visibility is what the customers continue to desire most.