BWise is an Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) platform formerly owned and supported by Nasdaq, acquired by SAI Global in April 2019.
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ServiceNow Governance, Risk, and Compliance
Score 8.1 out of 10
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ServiceNow Governance, Risk, and Compliance provides the tools businesses use to proactively manage risk by measuring, testing and auditing internal processes. This solution helps business users ensure compliance to regulations, policies, standards and frameworks. It is available via the Standard, Professional, and Enterprise editions, the latter two supporting GRC and internal auditing processes.
Well suited for general compliance, multiple initiatives, and integration with TeamMate. SAP GRC Process control may be better suited for an SAP environment. Oracle GRC may be better suited for an Oracle environment. Overall, BWise is a very cost effective, and flexible solution.
Oracle EBS R12 requires a unique user skillset to understand how it handles user access and functions. Accordingly, ServiceNow has this high level of sophistication to manage this information and apply it to Sensitive Access and Segregation of Duties rules to identify exceptions. This depth of configuration is critical to accurately identify when Oracle Responsibilities (access) truly allows access and thus could be a violation. ERPs with less complexity may not require this customization of ServiceNow GRC, but you would be wise to raise these questions and examples in the demo to ensure it will work for you. In the past, we have found that risks of under-reporting exceptions or false positives become so voluminous that users don't always get to the accurate violations for timely remediation. Proper configuration up front will improve your effectiveness and ROI down the road.
Great reporting tool (uses SAP Business Objects). It is quite flexible on types of reports that can be created and supported. Also the reporting consultants are very competent and nice.
Highly customizable solution: almost everything can be tailored to an organization's needs, assessments, audits, issues, recommendations, tasks, etc. However, there's a trade-off between customization and the integration of different areas of the organization.
Increases visibility and efficiency in the organization. BWise offers centralized repositories (catalogs) that can be easily accessed and used by everyone in the organization (e.g. Process catalog, Policies and Procedures catalog, Risks, Controls, Laws catalogs, etc.). Also, the application allows findings on controls tested by Audit to be automatically reflected in controls monitored by SOX for example, without the need for SOX to retest them. So one area can leverage on the work of other areas increasing operational efficiency.
Increases integration and avoids silos. By choosing the correct design (e.g. Risk Workshops instead of Open Assessments), one area can see and benefit from another areas' work. An example was mentioned above; another would be Operational Risk area considering the results of Business Continuity, Vendor Management, Info Security, etc. assessments when carrying out theirs. Additionally, processes can be integrated: when contracting a new vendor for instance, one can include questions about data confidentiality and usage of models in the Vendor risk assessment. Answers to these could then trigger Info Sec / Model Risk assessments.
Increases accountability. Application provides full audit/change log with the type of change, name of executor, and date of change.
Easier follow-up. BWise sends automatic emails with reminders to the people required to take action on an issue, assessment, etc.
Finding reported by the auditor. GRC helps us identify, assign, and track the resolution of this.
Exception to information security policy. These require quarterly reviews and setting up reminders to revisit these.
Building out new projects and baking security and compliance into the project and tracking it in GRC to ensure we deliver a compliant product on day one
Delivering more out of the box functionality that rivals other GRC platforms. The bare bones approach may not help companies that do not have expertise or capabilities to build effective GRC processes.
Easier way to implement workflow.
Offering better metrics without buying add-on tools.
I'm satisfied with our experience. The configuration was the biggest challenge, but we have moved onto the stage of user training and usability. We would appreciate having better user training documentation and possibly videos and/or computer-based training to help our international users adopt this software for their GRC needs.
It's a good system, but I am awaiting key features in the new release. We hear that ServiceNow is continually adding new features and we look for improved reporting, better Oracle Integration, and user training opportunities. To the extent these materialize, we expect further improvements in our experience with ServiceNow GRC. Until that time, though, we believe we are meeting our objectives expected at the beginning of this project.
Wasn't personally involved in the vendor selection process. I am aware that one of the main drivers for selecting BWise was cost (I believe BWise total project cost was several times lower than MetricStream's).
We just recently started using TrustArc for data privacy requests and I can already speak to the fact that TrustArc is a more confusing platform once there. The positives of ServiceNow would be that a majority of our URL's drive to owned websites which our employees are very comfortable with using versus pushing them to another website that feels unsafe.
