There’s a common theme that our consultants have noticed when implementing our GRC tool, SYNERGi, for clients over the years. It’s the demand for the ability to provision or enrich data into a given module of the tool through a self-service portal. This could be for initial risk assessments, third party information, asset onboarding, penetration requests… the list goes on.
With our experience, we’ve come to realise that the challenge within most organisations isn’t the ability to capture the data. The data can be easily captured via self-service forms within intranets like Microsoft SharePoint or similar. The challenge manifests through the next stage. The manual intervention required to sift through the data and perform a manual data mapping exercise to provision or enrich the data into their management tool of choice, such as the SYNERGi GRC Platform.
In light of these challenges being experienced by our clients, we have since enhanced SYNERGi. The tool now offers a new Questionnaire Portal.
What is the Questionnaire Portal?
In essence, the portal allows you to create certain ‘objects’, such as a risk or governance projects, using data acquired from a questionnaire you’ve sent out to third parties.
Features of the Questionnaire Portal:
- User-defined questionnaires can be configured
- Questionnaires have a static URL – therefore,
- Stakeholders who are required to complete these questionnaires don’t need to be SYNERGi account holders
- Stakeholders can self-serve the questionnaire, meaning they don’t have to wait to be sent one by a SYNERGi user
- Completion of the questionnaire could automatically provision objects such as Projects, Vendors, Risks, etc in SYNERGi.
- Submission of the portal questionnaire can feed into custom workflows to kick off BAU activities, such as approval/review notifications, follow up questionnaires /assessments, etc.
Tackling GRC challenges
We understand that each organisation’s processes are unique and the challenges they face differ from one to the next. However, we believe the Questionnaire Portal offers our clients a solution to integrate different teams, technologies and systems into a tool which can be defined as the ‘single source of truth’.
Want an example of the Portal in action? IRM has a client whose security team had a special requirement within their SYNERGi tool. They needed to be notified when a new Project or Vendor was proposed within their organisation so that they could perform an initial risk assessment.
With the new portal, the project managers are able to self-serve a questionnaire and the information they supply is used efficiently populate Project records, and create Vendor records automatically. SYNERGi is even able to automatically produce an initial calculation of risk, based on the questionnaire responses.
The team can then easily start the Vendor Assurance process from this Project record. The workflow functionality means that their required process is followed, through to the eventual Go/No Go decision for the project.
This new functionality has made a lot of processes more efficient for our SYNERGi customers. Sound like a function your organisation could benefit from? Head here to learn more about the SYNERGi GRC Platform or request a free demo.