Risk and compliance are important for the upper echelon of any organization – in the context of something that needs to be managed. There is a lot of focus on how a business can improve the way it ensures compliance and enhance the way it can manage and mitigate risks. The problem is that both of these areas can be a great source of business intelligence, but the lack of any centralized system to analyze the data means that the important insights stay hidden within the data.

What is business intelligence?

Knowing about the compliance and risk levels of the organization is necessary for managing an organization, but that is not what we mean when we talk about business intelligence. Business intelligence is data, analysis, or information that enables the executive branch of an organization to determine the right course for the organization.

Think of the business as a ship, and the executive branch as the captain of the ship and the captain’s advisors. Compliance in this context will be ensuring that the sailors are following the right protocols, while risks in this context will be the stormy seas and any glaciers that the ship needs to avoid. It is, obviously, necessary for the ship’s captain and their advisors to ensure both of these things but they do not necessarily constitute ‘business intelligence’.

Compare this to a captain and advisors who have access to real-time data from the ships different sections and is also using weather maps and radar data to chart a course. They aren’t just on a course and then managing compliance and risks – they are taking the information they have to chart a course for the ship which will result in the most successful possible journey for everyone on the ship. This is business intelligence – data and information which helps the executive branch successfully determine the right course of action.

Why risk and compliance related business intelligence remains elusive

Any manager would prefer to have as much business intelligence as possible to ensure that they make the best decisions. Why is it then that such important information is out of the reach of managers? The simple answer is that many risk and compliance processes are too complicated and challenging to manage to expect to get business intelligence while managing both. Businesses feel as if they are always reacting to risk and compliance scenarios, which means that they are too busy ensuring that both are being managed right.

Another major problem is data silos. All the information required to generate the business intelligence already exists within the organization, but it is spread out across the organization. Each department has its own risk and compliance data, but they only transmit summarized reports to the risk and compliance departments, who then combine these reports to generate risk and compliance reports presented to the board. Asking these departments to manually sift through all the data to generate business intelligence through predictive analytics and trend analysis is not a sustainable practice for more organizations.

Risk and compliance, which are traditionally areas of concern for most managers, end up becoming value-creating parts of the organization which help the executive branch make the right decisions for the future of the organization. Share on X

How risk and compliance technology is changing the game

Risk and compliance data sets are pieces of a puzzle that often never coalesce to become business intelligence. That is where risk and compliance technology solutions end up making a profound difference for most organization. The general expectation of most organizations is that risk and compliance technology solutions will enable their organizations to complete their existing risk and compliance processes at a faster rate with higher accuracy. While this expectation is met, what the organizations do not expect is that they can now do much more with risk and compliance data than ever before.

These solutions bring it all together by creating one platform for every line of defense. Every business unit uses the risk and compliance platform to enter the data from their unit. The risk and compliance departments use the same platform for reporting and analysis. The executive branch of the organization has access to the same platform, and they can see all the changes in risk and compliance across the organization in real-time.

The automation and streamlining of data analysis provide the executive branch access to information they never had access to before. While previously they had to wait until the end of the quarter to learn about risk and compliance issues then reactively manage them, they now get real-time access along with predictions of future risks so they can act proactively. They learn about emerging risks which may affect their business in the next quarter and can plan accordingly. They can get immediate details about nascent compliance issues and create a strategy to eliminate the non-compliance before it takes root in the organization.

Risk and compliance, which are traditionally areas of concern for most managers, end up becoming value-creating parts of the organization which help the executive branch make the right decisions for the future of the organization.

Would you like to see how business intelligence can be generated from the risk and compliance data in your organization? Get in touch with our risk and compliance experts for a detailed outlook and a demo of our solution Predict360.