The GRC Groundswell

As GRC practices continue to gain traction, I’ve had a lot of great conversations lately with clients about the importance of peer interaction for professionals in governance, risk, and compliance roles. With his finger apparently on the pulse of all major technology trends, Forrester’s Josh Bernoff must see this as well. This week he announced the winners of the 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards, with two top GRC vendors among the winners. (For those of you not familiar with Josh Bernoff or Groundswell, check out the book info here.)

MetricStream won in the “B2B Spreading” category for the company’s ComplianceOnline portal, a community with 500,000 members who are all there to find content, training, and services related to risk and compliance. Archer Technologies won in the “B2B Embracing” for its Archer Community and Archer Exchange, the former a peer networking site for customers and the latter a site where customers can share, download, or recommend application for the company’s platform.

MetricStream and Archer have both done a great job offering additional content and value to customers who are often facing very difficult and unprecedented challenges. Other vendors have taken a similar perspective by hosting user conferences focused more on best practices and lessons learned than on technology.

While some internal practices will continue to be seen as competitive advantages, I encourage those of you in GRC-related roles to find ways to share ideas and experiences with peers.  We have seen enough massive risk and compliance failures affect entire industries and markets to realize that improving GRC practices can be collectively beneficial.