Whenever organizations commit to working with a third party, they are choosing to introduce an additional risk factor into the business. It’s becoming more common for organizations to work with smaller, specialist suppliers, and therefore cultivate vast cohorts of suppliers that can be unwieldy to manage manually.
To have a clear view of risk – including risk to your reputation, your finances or strategy and your ability to comply with regulations – you need a complete view of all your third-party relationships. Not just a snapshot of what’s happening right now, but a clear understanding of the health of those relationships over their entire lifecycle.
Effectively managing multiple third-party suppliers means building risk management into the contracts, continually evaluating the suppliers’ work and assigning resources in proportion to the risk a supplier represents. It’s through a clearly defined process designed to manage third-party relationships throughout their entire lifecycle, accurate data and a proven governance structure that organizations can successfully mitigate third-party risk.
Read the entire article A Game of Risk originally published in the May 2020 edition of Governance and Compliance Magazine.
Please join me for an ISG Smartalk webinar Digital Governance: From Gut Instinct to Real-time Insight to explore how ISG GovernX helps enterprises and their third parties make the most of their relationships.
