What are the ServiceNow IRM modules?

1 – Policy and Compliance

This module enables you to automate best practice lifecycles and unify compliance processes, to better manage corporate compliance within a centralized process. It is the integration point where internal policies are linked to external regulations and best practices.

ServiceNow Policy and Compliance Management helps you to:

(-) Reduce risk using real-time insights into compliance, so that you can resolve issues before they turn into real risks.

(-) Enable automated compliance testing. Replace occasional testing with continuous monitoring. Not only reduce manual work, save time and cut costs, but also identify violations and respond faster.

(-) Simplify compliance with harmonized test controls across regulations and policies. Access the data from anywhere with mobile interfaces and interactive dashboards.

2 – Regulatory Change

Compliance continues to be a top priority in an extremely complex, ever-changing regulatory landscape. Using manual processes and spreadsheets is no longer an adequate means of keeping abreast of changes.

ServiceNow Regulatory Change provides you the tools to proactively manage regulatory changes and handle risk. Based on a single source of truth, this module integrates seamlessly with regulatory information sources and public RSS feeds. Within a seamless, end-to-end workflow it enables you to assess the impact of changes and monitor implementation efforts across your organization.

ServiceNow Regulatory Change Management helps you to:

(-) Increase productivity by cutting back on manual processes, and by automating workflows and task management across departments.

(-) Stay ahead of regulatory change by automatically scanning for any critical changes.

(-) Improve decision making based on real-time impact assessments.

3 – Risk Management

Managing risk effectively is all about being able to identify, analyze and prioritize high-impact risks. ServiceNow Risk Management enables you to do just that and make informed risk-based decisions.

This module enables you to identify and manage risk in a single place. It identifies non-compliant controls and monitors high-risk areas automatically.

 ServiceNow Risk Management enables:

(-) Better risk reporting with real-time insights provided by role-based dashboards.

(-) Faster and better decision making based on automated risk scores that also enable prioritization of actions.

(-) Smarter and quicker issue management by automating workflows across teams and using AI to assign and suggest corrective actions.

4 – 3rd Party and Vendor Risk

As businesses rely more on third parties for products or services, such parties are also increasingly key to business success. At the same time, third party risk and non-compliance can also impact your organization or business continuity.

ServiceNow Vendor Risk Management enables you to automate vendor risk assessments and provides you full transparency into the status of issues. It does away with time-consuming and fault-prone siloed information and manual tracking of third-party risk. Customizable dashboards are based on a common data model that aligns vendor risk management with your risk strategy to create an integrated view of risk.

ServiceNow 3rd Party and Vendor Risk Management helps you to:

(-) Boost efficiency, productivity and visibility by automating risk assessments. Know which risks need to be tackled with automated tracking of the performance of your vendors.

(-) Enable collaboration with third-party vendors through automated processes and workflows that also provide vendors visibility into the status of assessments, issues and tasks.

(-) Integrate your Vendor Risk Management with your organizational-wide risk management strategy.

5 – Audit Management

Audit management is all about ensuring that board-approved audit directives are implemented by all parties involved in the process of compiling audits.

ServiceNow Audit Management enables you to streamline audit processes, scope and prioritize audit management and planning, based on real-time and aggregated risk data. It also helps avoid duplication of work and improves decision making by continuous compliance monitoring.

ServiceNow Audit Management helps you to:

(-) Streamline all audit processes into an automated audit engagement life cycle.

(-) Improve audit management and planning with scheduled or automated data findings.

(-) Enhance audit assurance and help audit managers stay ahead of issues with continuous compliance monitoring.

6 – Resilience and Continuity Management

Disruptions in operations are a continual threat to any business. Whether it regards the threat from non-compliant vendors, a hiccup in your IT services or any unforeseen disasters. They all bring with them the risk of bringing your business to a shuddering halt.

ServiceNow Business Continuity Management enables you to define, prepare, test and execute solutions to restore operations in case of an actual crisis or a planned event.

The application finds and prioritizes business services to produce recovery time and point objectives. Using business and operational data from the CMDB, it tracks the lifecycle of plans and ensures they are up to date and accurate.

ServiceNow Resilience and Continuity Management helps you to:

(-) Prioritize critical functions, find key dependencies, and create plans to protect vital assets.

(-) Identify and close gaps in continuity plans by running and testing continuity plans.

(-) Recover more quickly and reduce disaster impacts with continuity plans. Make fast, informed decisions by understanding dependencies.

ServiceNow IRM according to Forrester

ServiceNow commissioned Forrester to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying ServiceNow.

‘To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed five customers with experience using ServiceNow GRC, Vendor Risk Management, and Business Continuity Management.’

‘Prior to investing in ServiceNow, the interviewees said that their organization’s risk management was haphazard, lacked efficient business continuity planning, and compliance management was fragmented, i.e., compliance was done manually across several disparate spreadsheets or through legacy systems with antiquated processes. Managing regulatory and operational risks was difficult, and the issues were further exacerbated by mounting operational compliance requirements and regulatory pressures.’

Prior to ServiceNow, interviewees experienced the following limitations:

[-] Spotty compliance, due to a lack of a centralized source of information

[-] Governance, risk, and compliance still very much a manual effort.

[-] Reporting near impossible with hundreds upon hundreds of spreadsheets.

[-] Compliance and risk processes used to keep the business upright rather than move it forward.

[-] Inefficient business continuity planning due to lacking technology.

According to Forrester, ServiceNow solutions helped these customers:

[-] Automate tasks/workflows and reduce manual oversight.

[-] Improve the compliance and risk management efficiencies and help scale GRC efforts.

[-] Consolidate data and link and map information for better impact analysis and business continuity.

[-] Gain efficiency and better optimize resources with reduction of redundant tasks and improved risk management.

[-] Accelerate decision-making process with improved integration between risk and compliance.

[-] Effectively manage third-party risk and disruption with faster vendor assessments enabled by vendor risk management program.

[-] Develop a more efficient business continuity management program through identification and prioritization of business-critical core processes in the delivery of products and services to its internal and external customers.

[-] Provides better visibility to executives through more accurate and timely reporting.

Key Findings by Forrester:

The customer interviews revealed the following key quantifiable benefits that add up to a ROI of 235% over 3 years.

[-] Compliance testing efficiency gains from automation

[-] Savings from risk management efficiencies

[-] Audit savings through improved visibility with ServiceNow

[-] Reduction in cost to assess vendor risk

[-] Efficiency gain from ServiceNow BCM

[-] GRC, VRM, and BCM Management Productivity

‘With the advent of linked and mapped information, risk analysis and reporting became a much simpler process … transparency and new insights, allowing organizational leaders to improve business decision-making and reduce risk. Reporting could finally be conducted easily without a laborious undertaking of compiling siloed data across hundreds of spreadsheets.’