GRC strategy: Build integrated governance with the right people, processes and technology
Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) teams shouldn't operate in separate worlds. Yet most do. According to Diligent Institute's transaction readiness report, 60% of organizations report completely siloed or only partially integrated GRC and finance systems. This creates real problems: delayed strategic decisions, gaps in risk visibility and increased compliance exposure.
A unified GRC strategy integrates systems and processes across business units, enabling better risk management and regulatory compliance. The business case for integration is clear: companies with integrated GRC infrastructure demonstrate faster transaction execution, higher investor confidence and more effective board oversight.
With this in mind, this comprehensive article covers:
- What a GRC strategy encompasses and why integration matters
- How to create a GRC strategy with clear implementation steps
- Building trust between governance, risk and compliance stakeholders
- Selecting committee structures and assessing GRC maturity
- How AI-powered platforms transform GRC strategy execution
What is a GRC strategy?
A GRC strategy is your organization's integrated approach to achieving objectives reliably (governance), addressing uncertainty (risk management) and acting with integrity (compliance). Rather than treating these as separate domains, an effective GRC strategy coordinates them across business units, geographies and stakeholders.
The shift from siloed to integrated GRC reflects business reality. Risk decisions impact compliance requirements. Governance structures determine how effectively you manage both. When functions operate independently with separate tools and reporting lines, organizations lack comprehensive visibility into actual risk exposure.
For mid-market companies preparing for transactions or public offerings, integrated GRC has become table stakes. Investors and auditors expect coordinated oversight, unified risk frameworks and board-level governance that demonstrate strategic control.
How to create a GRC strategy
Creating an effective GRC strategy requires methodical planning across people, processes and technology. The following framework outlines practical steps organizations have successfully used to move from fragmented approaches to integrated GRC execution.
1. Assess your current state and define ownership
Document how governance, risk and compliance functions currently operate. Map the tools each uses, their reporting lines and how information flows between departments. Identify where processes overlap, where gaps exist and where siloes prevent comprehensive risk visibility.
Most companies discover significant blind spots — risks that fall between departmental responsibilities or compliance obligations that multiple teams duplicate.
Establish who owns each element of your GRC strategy. Determine whether your chief compliance officer (CCO), chief risk officer (CRO), and chief audit executive (CAE) have defined integration points or operate independently. Then, create an accountability matrix that shows which roles approve risk appetite, oversee compliance programs, report to the board and manage third-party risks.
2. Build trust between risk management stakeholders
Risk management involves multiple executives who make critical strategic decisions. When operational leaders trust each other and share information freely, your GRC strategy gains the foundation it needs.
Start with executives who already work together on strategic initiatives. Use those relationships to create bridges between historically independent functions. When compliance and risk management leaders trust each other, they stop optimizing for departmental metrics and start solving enterprise challenges. They share emerging concerns before they escalate and present unified recommendations to the board.
"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."
3. Choose your GRC committee structure
Organizations must decide whether GRC coordination happens through formal committees with defined governance or through informal working groups.
Formal committees offer clear accountability, appear on organizational charts and have documented charters. For public companies or organizations preparing for IPO, formal structures demonstrate governance maturity to investors and regulators.
On the other hand, informal coordination provides flexibility and psychological safety. Participants can test ideas and build consensus before presenting recommendations through official channels.
For mid-market companies, informal structures allow executives to establish collaborative patterns before committing to permanent changes.
The choice depends on your organizational culture and governance maturity. Regardless of structure, effective GRC coordination requires consistent participation from key stakeholders, clear escalation paths and documented outcomes that create accountability.
4. Assess GRC maturity and set strategic objectives
Understanding where your organization stands relative to industry benchmarks helps identify improvement priorities. Here’s what you need to do:
- Start with competitor analysis by researching how organizations in your industry approach GRC challenges.
- Evaluate your capabilities across risk identification processes, compliance gap remediation speed, board intelligence quality and controls testing efficiency.
This assessment surfaces concrete improvement opportunities and helps you set strategic objectives tied to business outcomes.
Your GRC strategy should enable business results, not just satisfy regulatory requirements. Examples include:
- Reducing transaction preparation time by consolidating governance documentation
- Improving audit findings through continuous controls monitoring
- Accelerating board decision-making through unified risk reporting
Organizations that tie GRC objectives to business metrics gain executive support and appropriate resources.
5. Integrate ESG and comprehensive risk management
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors now directly impact your ability to close deals, win customers and attract investors. What started as voluntary reporting has become a standard part of due diligence and vendor assessments.
Enterprise buyers want to see your environmental practices and labor standards before signing contracts. Private equity firms evaluate ESG posture before closing deals. Public market investors factor ESG performance into allocation decisions. This has moved from corporate social responsibility to risk management that affects your bottom line.
Regulatory requirements are accelerating, too:
- European operations face Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive disclosures
- Climate-related financial reporting is expanding globally
You need infrastructure that captures this data and tracks changing requirements across jurisdictions. The key is integration, not duplication. Don't create separate ESG programs with their own tools and processes. Instead, connect environmental and social factors to your existing risk categories.
Climate events affect operational resilience, labor practices influence talent retention and supply chain transparency impacts reputation. Treat these as risk factors that belong in your enterprise framework, not as compliance exercises that sit apart from core business operations.
6. Establish board-level reporting frameworks
Board reporting represents the ultimate test of GRC integration. Directors need comprehensive intelligence about governance quality, risk exposure and compliance status without operational overwhelm.
"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.
Create reporting frameworks that highlight material information:
- Risk dashboards should flag significant exposures, emerging threats and risk appetite alignment changes
- Compliance reports should identify gaps and remediation progress
- Operational resilience metrics should demonstrate the capacity to withstand disruptions
Use consistent formats that allow directors to track changes quarterly. Visual tools like heatmaps provide intuitive risk visualization, trend analysis reveals whether risks are increasing or decreasing and industry benchmarking contextualizes your risk profile against comparable organizations.
7. Build the technology infrastructure and integration roadmap
Most organizations start with reporting integration. Instead of your board receiving separate updates from risk, audit and compliance, you create unified dashboards that show the complete picture. This quick win demonstrates value and builds momentum for harder changes.
Next comes standardizing how different teams assess risk. Your compliance team shouldn't use completely different frameworks from your operational risk group. When everyone speaks the same language about likelihood and impact, you can actually compare risks across the enterprise.
The technology consolidation comes last because it's the most disruptive. Look at whether your current tools help teams work together or keep them in separate systems. Can you pull together a board report without manually copying data between platforms? If preparing board materials takes your team three days of spreadsheet work, that's a technology problem worth solving.
Each phase should make something tangibly better. Faster reporting, fewer duplicated assessments, better risk visibility. If a technology change doesn't improve how people actually work, delay it.
Strategic GRC implementation
Build an integrated governance infrastructure that scales with your organization. Explore how to align GRC processes with business objectives.
Request a demo8. Measure performance and refine continuously
You need to know if your GRC strategy is actually working. Track practical measures like how long board reporting takes, how often different teams are assessing the same risks, and how quickly you close compliance gaps.
But numbers only tell part of the story. Talk to your board about whether they're getting the intelligence they need to make decisions. Ask your risk and compliance teams if coordination is getting easier or if it still feels forced. The goal is an integrated GRC system that makes everyone's job more effective, not just another initiative that creates extra work.
GRC maturity takes time. Expect to adjust your approach based on what you learn. The organizations that succeed treat this as continuous improvement, not a one-time project.
How AI transforms GRC strategy execution
Organizations building integrated GRC strategies face a practical challenge: coordinating governance, risk and compliance functions without creating an unsustainable administrative burden.
When your risk team uses one system, compliance uses another and audit uses a third, pulling together board reports becomes a manual data aggregation exercise that consumes days of staff time.
Unified GRC platforms solve this fragmentation problem. The Diligent One Platform centralizes board management and GRC activities in one unified platform, with integrations to 100+ leading third‑party data providers, including your existing enterprise tools.
Instead of exporting data from multiple sources and rebuilding it in spreadsheets, the platform aggregates information automatically.
The platform's board-ready reporting templates transform how directors receive risk intelligence. Rather than reading separate updates from risk, audit and compliance functions, each with different formats and terminology, boards see unified dashboards showing enterprise-wide risk exposure, compliance status and governance quality in consistent views.
Beyond reporting consolidation, AI‑powered analytics, continuous monitoring and scenario modeling help surface emerging risks sooner, so teams can shift effort from manual aggregation to analysis and action.
Diligent ERM uses predictive analytics to surface emerging threats before they escalate into material issues. With Diligent ERM Reporting, powered by Moody’s, you can benchmark your risk posture against competitors and industry peers, giving the board clear external reference points for better decision‑making.
Moving from fragmented tools to a unified platform changes how governance actually works. Instead of quarterly board snapshots, you get real-time risk intelligence. Instead of discovering compliance gaps during audits, you catch them immediately. Instead of annual risk assessments, you monitor continuously.
Ready to see how integrated GRC platforms work in practice? Request a demo to explore how Diligent can transform your GRC strategy.
FAQs about GRC strategy
What's the difference between GRC and ERM?
GRC describes integrated oversight of how organizations achieve objectives, manage uncertainty and maintain regulatory compliance, while ERM (enterprise risk management) is the risk management component of GRC.
Organizations need both: ERM provides the risk identification and assessment framework, while GRC encompasses the governance structures and compliance programs that enable effective risk management. Learn more about the differences between GRC and ERM here.
How long does it take to implement a GRC strategy?
Implementation timelines vary by organizational size, current governance maturity and technology infrastructure. Most mid-market companies establish foundational GRC integration within 6-12 months.
This includes assessing the current state, defining roles and responsibilities, implementing coordination structures and deploying unified reporting. Full maturity typically requires 18-24 months as organizations refine processes and build trust across previously siloed functions.
What are the most common mistakes in GRC strategy?
Organizations frequently fail by treating GRC as a compliance exercise rather than a strategic enabler. Other common mistakes include maintaining siloed tools that prevent data integration, overwhelming boards with operational detail instead of strategic intelligence and failing to establish clear accountability for GRC coordination.
The most significant error is delaying the GRC strategy until transactions or regulatory pressure force rapid implementation.
How do you measure GRC strategy effectiveness?
Effective metrics include:
- Time required for board reporting
- The number of material risks identified before they escalate
- Speed of compliance gap remediation
- Quality of risk intelligence reaching executives
- Efficiency of controls testing
Transaction readiness provides another benchmark: Organizations with mature GRC strategies complete due diligence faster with fewer governance concerns raised by investors or auditors. Discover more about GRC reporting here.
Should smaller companies invest in GRC infrastructure?
Growth-stage companies benefit significantly from an integrated GRC infrastructure. The governance, risk and compliance capabilities that support funding rounds, strategic transactions and operational scaling are the same capabilities required for public company readiness.
Building GRC infrastructure proactively costs less than retrofitting governance when investors demand visibility or regulators raise compliance concerns.
Request a demo to see how integrated GRC platforms enable strategic oversight and operational excellence.
