Best practice GRC reporting: What is it and how can you achieve it?
Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) concerns are reaching a critical threshold for organizations across all sectors. PwC's Global Compliance Survey reveals that 77% of executives report their companies have been negatively impacted across multiple growth-driving areas due to compliance requirements, with 85% noting increased complexity. Additionally, 64% of CEOs cite regulation as the top barrier to business reinvention.
Regulatory frameworks continue evolving globally, from the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) to the Network and Information Security Directive (NIS-2), while boards expect real-time visibility into risk exposure and compliance status across all business operations.
The challenge extends beyond meeting mandatory reporting requirements. Effective GRC reporting has become crucial to organizational resilience, informed strategic decision-making, and maintaining stakeholder confidence.
With that in mind, this article explains how to implement effective GRC reporting practices by covering:
- What GRC reporting encompasses and why it matters for organizations today
- The board's role in GRC reporting excellence
- Common challenges in GRC reporting
- Best practices for GRC reporting excellence
- How AI-powered technology transforms GRC reporting
What is GRC reporting, and why has it become business-critical?
The OCEG GRC Capability Model defines GRC as an organization's ability to achieve objectives reliably (governance), address uncertainty (risk management), and act with integrity (compliance). Each component requires measurement, monitoring and evidence to demonstrate performance and progress to stakeholders.
This is particularly true as GRC has become increasingly recognized as a growth driver rather than just a risk mitigation tool and regulatory compliance requirement. Your performance in all aspects of GRC will play a growing role in your organization's attractiveness as an investment, employer, and supplier.
As regulatory requirements accelerate, GRC reporting has transformed from periodic compliance exercises to continuous business intelligence.
- DORA requires financial institutions to demonstrate operational resilience through continuous monitoring and third-party risk management.
- NIS2 expands cybersecurity requirements across critical infrastructure sectors.
- Supply chain regulations demand transparency into vendor relationships and compliance status.
Beyond regulatory compliance, GRC reporting influences investment decisions, customer relationships, and competitive positioning. Investors increasingly evaluate governance quality when making allocation decisions. Customers expect transparency about data protection and ethical business practices. Boards need real-time intelligence to make informed decisions about emerging risks.
Organizations now face both voluntary reporting frameworks, like the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and mandatory requirements such as gender pay gap disclosures. This dual obligation requires governance infrastructure that supports comprehensive data collection, analysis and stakeholder communication without creating an unsustainable administrative burden.
Who should be involved in GRC reporting?
The board retains strategic responsibility for GRC reporting and plays the central role in oversight. However, effective implementation requires coordinated involvement across multiple organizational functions with clear accountability and information flow.
Board-level oversight
Directors set strategic direction for GRC programs, approve risk appetite, and ensure adequate resources for effective governance. They review comprehensive reports that synthesize data from across the organization into actionable insights about risk exposure and compliance status.
"Tell the board what they need to know, not what you know," says David Platt, Chief Strategic Development Officer and Member, Executive Leadership Team at Moody's. This principle recognizes that boards need synthesized intelligence, not raw data dumps.
Executive leadership
The C-suite translates board direction into operational reality. Chief risk officers, chief compliance officers and chief audit executives own specific GRC domains while collaborating to provide integrated reporting that reflects how risks and compliance obligations interact across business processes.
Risk, audit and compliance teams
These functions generate the detailed analysis that supports board reporting. They collect data, assess risks, monitor controls and identify compliance gaps. Collaboration between these historically siloed teams has become essential for comprehensive GRC reporting.
Business unit leaders
Process owners and department heads provide the operational data that underpins GRC reporting. Their engagement determines the data quality and the organization's ability to respond effectively when reporting and identifying issues that require remediation.
"What are the risks you want the board to be focused on?" asks Derek Vadala, Chief Risk Officer at Bitsight Technologies. "The board really wants to understand, 'What should they be worried about? What are you doing about it? How are we doing in that program?' It's hard to get to that conversation, which is key to establishing trust, because we start with bringing a lot of data and not showing what to focus on."
Organizations that succeed with GRC reporting establish clear governance structures that define roles, responsibilities, and escalation paths. They create feedback loops that ensure insights from reporting drive continuous improvement in risk management and compliance practices.
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Download the guideThe board's role in GRC reporting excellence
Boards cannot delegate their fundamental accountability for governance, risk management, and compliance. While they appropriately delegate operational execution, directors maintain oversight responsibility that requires them to understand GRC performance and hold management accountable for results.
Effective boards approach GRC reporting as a strategic tool. They establish clear expectations about what information they need, in what format, and at what frequency. This clarity prevents the common problem of overwhelming directors with excessive data while omitting critical insights.
Leading boards typically expect:
- Risk dashboards that highlight significant exposures, emerging threats, and risk appetite alignment across the organization. These dashboards should flag outliers and trends rather than presenting static snapshots.
- Compliance status reports to identify gaps, remediation progress, and potential violations before they escalate into regulatory problems or reputational damage.
- Operational resilience metrics that demonstrate the organization's capacity to withstand disruptions, recover from incidents, and maintain critical functions during stress events.
- Third-party risk assessments provide visibility into vendor compliance, cybersecurity posture, and potential supply chain vulnerabilities that could impact organizational performance.
Boards model the importance of GRC by dedicating adequate meeting time to governance discussions, asking probing questions about risk management effectiveness, and ensuring management has appropriate resources for GRC programs. When boards treat GRC as an afterthought, the entire organization follows their lead.
The most effective boards establish dedicated risk committees or expand audit committee charters to encompass comprehensive GRC oversight. This structural change signals that GRC deserves focused attention from directors with relevant expertise.
Common challenges in GRC reporting
Organizations struggle with GRC reporting for predictable reasons that stem from complexity, resource constraints, and inadequate technology infrastructure. Understanding these challenges helps identify targeted solutions rather than implementing generic improvements that fail to address root causes.
1. Data accuracy and completeness concerns
GRC reporting requires data from multiple systems, departments, and geographic locations. Manual data collection creates opportunities for errors, omissions, and inconsistencies that undermine report credibility and decision-making quality.
Organizations often discover data quality problems only when preparing board reports or responding to regulatory inquiries. By that point, remediation requires expensive manual verification and delays reporting timelines. The lack of real-time data validation means that reports may reflect outdated information, which no longer accurately represents current risk exposure or compliance status.
2. Lack of comprehensive visibility
Business processes span multiple departments, systems, and entities in ways that traditional organizational structures don't naturally capture. This fragmentation makes it challenging to comprehend how risks propagate throughout the organization or how compliance gaps in one area can create exposure elsewhere.
Without comprehensive visibility, organizations struggle to answer basic questions about their risk profile. They cannot confidently assess whether controls adequately address identified risks. Additionally, they fail to recognize when operational changes create new governance requirements.
3. Siloed teams and fragmented approaches
Risk, audit, compliance and legal functions often operate independently with separate tools, processes, and reporting lines. This fragmentation creates redundant effort, inconsistent terminology, and gaps where responsibilities overlap or fall between organizational boundaries.
"By far our most commonly used feature is search. Having that single source of truth can help break down silos," says Curtis Duncan, Senior Manager, Customer Success at Diligent. Organizations with siloed GRC functions spend excessive time reconciling different risk assessments, resolving conflicting compliance interpretations, and explaining why various reports present different pictures of organizational performance.
4. Creating comprehensive strategies
GRC encompasses a broad range of issues — from cybersecurity and financial controls to supply chain risks and ESG commitments — that necessitate significant coordination and expertise to develop comprehensive strategies. Organizations struggle to prioritize among competing demands while ensuring adequate coverage of all material risks.
Without comprehensive approaches, organizations take tactical responses to individual requirements rather than building an integrated governance infrastructure. They implement point solutions for specific regulations, creating technical debt and integration challenges.
Best practices for GRC reporting excellence
Organizations that excel at GRC reporting implement specific practices that deliver actionable intelligence while managing complexity and resource constraints effectively. These practices reflect lessons from companies that successfully transformed governance capabilities.
Start with clear objectives
Define what success looks like for GRC reporting before implementing processes and technology. Identify the specific decisions that reporting should inform, the stakeholders who need information, and the frequency required for different report types.
Clear objectives prevent the common trap of collecting excessive data that is never used for decision-making. They enable prioritization when resource constraints require choices about where to focus improvement efforts.
Establish data governance standards
Data quality determines reporting credibility. Organizations need consistent definitions, standardized collection processes, and validation procedures that ensure accuracy and completeness across all data sources.
Data governance includes clear ownership for each data element, documented processes for updates and corrections, and regular quality audits that identify systematic problems requiring process improvements.
Invest in team collaboration
Breaking down silos between risk, audit, compliance, and business functions requires intentional effort. Create cross-functional working groups, establish shared objectives, and implement collaborative tools that make cooperation the path of least resistance.
"Everyone has a role to play in risk management. You don't have to be a risk professional; you can be on a school board, in a nonprofit, or in a large corporation. It's something everyone should be doing, looking at the risks and the future," says Amanda Carty, Managing Director, Strategic Market Solutions at Diligent.
Implement continuous improvement processes
GRC reporting should evolve based on feedback from boards, management, and regulatory developments. Regularly solicit input about report usefulness, clarity, and timeliness. Track leading indicators like report preparation time, data accuracy and decision-making impact.
Use this intelligence to refine reporting content, adjust frequency and improve processes that create bottlenecks or quality problems.
Leverage appropriate technology
Manual processes cannot deliver the real-time visibility, comprehensive coverage, and analytical depth that contemporary GRC reporting requires. Organizations require platforms that automate routine tasks, integrate data from multiple sources and provide insights that enhance human judgment.
The right technology eliminates administrative burden while improving reporting quality and decision-making effectiveness. It creates capacity for strategic work by handling repetitive data collection and validation tasks.
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See Diigent in actionHow AI-powered technology transforms GRC reporting
Manual GRC reporting cannot scale to meet current requirements. The volume of data, complexity of regulations, and speed of business change exceed human capacity for comprehensive oversight without technological support. Organizations need unified platforms that integrate governance, risk, compliance, and audit management rather than disconnected point solutions.
AI-powered governance platforms change how organizations approach GRC reporting by moving beyond basic workflow automation. They provide intelligence that enhances the quality of decision-making and the effectiveness of risk management.
1. Unified governance infrastructure with embedded intelligence
Diligent One Platform centralizes board collaboration, risk management, compliance tracking and audit coordination into a unified solution that scales from mid-market to enterprise complexity. The platform provides real-time visibility into GRC performance across all organizational levels and geographic locations.
Key capabilities include secure board portals for confidential governance discussions, automated compliance monitoring that tracks regulatory changes, comprehensive risk dashboards that highlight exposure and mitigation effectiveness, and integrated audit management that coordinates planning, execution, and reporting.
2. Intelligent board preparation and proactive risk monitoring
Diligent’s Smart Board Book Builder transforms governance material preparation by:
- Synthesizing information from multiple sources
- Identifying relevant updates
- Organizing content based on meeting agendas and board priorities
This reduces board preparation time from weeks to days while improving material quality and consistency.
Smart Risk Scanner continuously analyzes documents, communications and business processes to identify potential legal issues, compliance gaps and sensitive content before distribution. Real-time monitoring provides alerts when risk indicators exceed established thresholds, enabling immediate response rather than waiting for periodic reporting cycles.
3. Comprehensive analytics and continuous controls monitoring
ACL Analytics provides AI-powered analytics that analyze 100% of transactional data rather than traditional sampling approaches. The platform processes enterprise-scale data in real time, identifies anomalies and provides detailed analysis that supports strategic decision-making.
Organizations using ACL Analytics shift from periodic audits to continuous oversight, enabling earlier risk detection and more effective control optimization. Continuous controls monitoring validates control effectiveness in real-time rather than through periodic testing, providing greater assurance while reducing administrative burden.
4. Advanced risk intelligence and entity management
Diligent's enterprise risk management (ERM) solutions provide comprehensive risk oversight that scales with organizational complexity. AI Risk Essentials — built specifically for lean teams launching an ERM program — delivers advanced risk analytics, automated scenario modeling and a comprehensive risk library that accelerates risk assessment and monitoring. The platform benchmarks organizational risk profiles against industry standards and identifies emerging threats based on real-world events, helping organizations move from reactive risk management to proactive intelligence.
For organizations managing complex corporate structures, Diligent Entities automates legal entity management with real-time compliance monitoring and proactive alerts. The platform prevents authority gaps that create operational risks, maintains comprehensive audit trails for regulatory examinations, and provides visibility into entity-level compliance status across global operations.
Ready to transform your GRC reporting with enterprise-grade AI capabilities? Schedule a demo to discover how Diligent automates governance, risk, and compliance oversight while delivering the real-time visibility your board needs.
FAQs about GRC reporting
What are the most critical GRC reporting requirements for public companies?
Public companies must comply with accelerated SEC disclosure requirements, including material cybersecurity incidents within four business days. These requirements represent a fundamental shift from traditional quarterly reporting cycles to near real-time compliance obligations.
How can organizations measure ROI from GRC technology investments?
Effective GRC platforms reduce preparation time from weeks to hours, eliminate manual document synthesis, and provide continuous risk monitoring that prevents regulatory violations. Organizations should track metrics, including board preparation efficiency, compliance cycle time reduction, and early risk identification capabilities.
What role should AI play in contemporary GRC reporting?
AI capabilities should focus on document synthesis, risk pattern identification, and continuous monitoring rather than replacing human judgment. Smart automation handles routine data processing while enabling human experts to focus on risk assessment and complex compliance decisions.
How do pre-IPO companies prepare GRC reporting for public market transition?
Pre-IPO organizations need sophisticated committee management, automated compliance tracking, and audit trail capabilities. GRC platforms should scale seamlessly from private company flexibility to public company regulatory requirements without requiring system changes.
What are the biggest mistakes organizations make in GRC reporting implementation?
Common failures include underestimating data quality requirements, implementing technology without addressing organizational silos, and choosing solutions that don't scale with business growth. Successful implementations require thorough change management alongside technology deployment.
Ready to transform your GRC reporting capabilities? Schedule a demo to see how Diligent One delivers the real-time visibility and automated intelligence your board needs.
