The 2014 GRC Technology Innovation Awards was filled with competition.   Nominations increased to 62 over last year’s awards, and fifteen winners were selected.  GRC 20/20 looked through all of the submissions, asked for clarification where needed, and selected15 recipients that demonstrated outside the box thinking in taking GRC in new directions to receive this year’s award.

Be Informed Empowers Organizations to be Agile in the Midst of Regulatory Change

The Be Informed GRC-solution is based on the Be Informed business process platform, which is a platform using innovative semantic technology which can be understood as a shared vocabulary of business concepts describing the terminology of products, services, processes, activities, business knowledge and policies. It is fully model-driven, which means that requirements and specifications are expressed in semantic models, which can be directly executed, i.e. without transformation to another (programming) environment. This constraint-based process approach allows for dynamic processes, by which every individual transaction has its own process flow, depending on the data and context of that transaction.

The Be Informed semantic technology enables the dynamic management of regulations and changes in the GRC environment.  This allows organizations to stay current with the ever-continuing stream of new and changing regulations.  Organizations will find that regulatory change alongside business change and risk change becomes easier to manage, control, and traceable. Semantic models determine behavior of the business within rules. With Be Informed, the rules of business are modeled, not coded, in a visual and very comprehensible way for business users. This enables users to easily understand and change business rules, making the Be Informed business process platform an agile solution.

Be Informed through its semantics engine allows organizations to be in full control. In the GRC-space this means being able to handle complexity and change (e.g., regulatory change, business change, risk change), to provide a holistic integrated view of change, to enable transparency, and have complete insight and overview of accountability domains – on both content and process.  This is enhanced by audit trails that demonstrate accountability to customers, employees, shareholders and supervisory authorities.

By using the semantic models, you can define the requirements in an accurate, concise and machine executable format. Semantic models are used to make decisions, to classify what is applicable (and/or needed) and to calculate values. These outcomes are used to determine which controls are applicable, which data is needed to perform activities, how to drive the workflow process and even to determine which components of a report must be generated.

The Be Informed framework consists of three parts. The first part is the Definition part by using semantic models. Here Regulations and Policies are translated into regulatory and risk controls.  Second, once a control is defined it can be executed as a service in any of the core processes of the organization as represented. A transaction can only be completed if all necessary controls have resulted in a positive outcome. And third, Be Informed supports the review and evaluation of the effectiveness of the controls by planning, scheduling and executing of all kinds of assessments with the GRC-Workplace.

To learn more about the GRC 20/20 2014 GRC Innovation Awards and other recipients, please visit this post: GRC 20/20 Announces 2014 GRC Innovation Award Recipients

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