Enhancing Business Agility and Accelerating GRC with Low-Code/No-Code Configurations

Introduction

Today, organizations are highly dependent on software solutions to address specific business challenges. With regard to the management of governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) processes, there are a number of GRC solution providers in the market today.

The software implementation part of the GRC program could span multiple months based on the complexity of the requirements for each department involved in the program. Some of these changes could involve extensive customizations to the software to make it suit the specific needs, which brings with it the cost of expensive upgrades and maintenance. Organizations are usually recommended to stick to the standard out-of-the-box offering in order to keep these costs low. There is effectively a trade-off between running an efficient GRC program and dealing with the small nuances that are needed in the software to make the GRC adoption easier.

One way to get around this problem is to adopt a platform that contains the GRC best practices embedded into the software along with the flexibility to make configuration changes or extensions easy to implement and maintain on an ongoing basis. A low-code/no-code platform is one that provides a wide array of tools to configure and extend the product’s functionality and enable the customer to adapt the product to their specific needs.

The Need for This Change

Agility has been a key requirement for all enterprises to be able to adapt to the rapidly changing business, regulatory, and security landscapes. Traditional approaches to software and service delivery are no longer enough to keep up with these ever-changing needs. The need for agility has also forced many organizations to adopt cloud and SaaS in order to be nimbler in their responses. SaaS software usually comes with a predefined set of features and offers an inflexible model to cater to an enterprise’s unique needs. One way of dealing with this was to engage the software vendor’s service teams to tweak the software to the specific needs and requirements.

Customization of the software involves additional costs in terms of making the changes, testing, deployment, and maintenance of the software. There is a huge dependency introduced on the availability of technically competent personnel either from the software vendor, or a partner or training in-house resources to maintain the software. Customizations also introduce complexity when upgrading the software to future versions, and most enterprises postpone these upgrades because of the time, effort, and cost involved, which leaves them behind in terms of adopting the latest innovations and features.

If the software has built-in configurability options along with a simple-to-use set of tools, with a reduced learning curve for the implementation team, this can expedite the app delivery and reduce the dependency on expert developers to make the changes required to the software. Low-Code/No-Code cuts total IT expenses while increasing productivity and efficiency due to the increased degree of automation reached.

In addition to the faster implementation times, Low-Code/No-Code tools also bring efficiencies in upgrading the software with minimal effort, enabling customers to adopt upgrades to the software more frequently and stay current with the changing trends.

MetricStream’s Low-Code/No-Code Capabilities

MetricStream’s recent Euphrates release brings out key features to enable customers easily configure our products using a low-code Domain Specific Language (DSL) to define and create business rules. This helps customers in faster adoption of the platform and products while supporting them to modify the products with minimum or no customization thus reducing the implantation cost and time significantly. The configurations and extensions are maintained in a separate layer enabling customers to adopt subsequent upgrades to the product more quickly without extensive upgrade effort.

For MetricStream’s implementation partners and customers with in-house delivery teams, this release promises a faster learning curve while empowering them to configure and extend the products to suit their specific needs. The Low-code DSL approach to defining business rules significantly brings down the need for learning niche languages like PLSQL or Javascript.

Low-Code/No-Code in conjunction with upgrade safety is a key differentiating factor, a new frontier in digital transformation for customers.

To learn more about MetricStream’s Euphrates release, click here.