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The Digital Mirror

By Bill Bensing, Alex Honor

Reflecting Changes in GRC with Digital Twins

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The authors explore the concept of digital twins in the context of governance, risk, compliance, and assurance (GRCA) activities. They discuss how digital twins can transform GRCA practices, enabling real-time compliance monitoring, predictive analytics, and prescriptive actions.

  • Format PDF
  • Pages 28
  • Publication Date May 7, 2024

Features

  • Practical Guidance

    Combines practical guidance on using digital twins in GRCA activities.

  • Deep Dive

    Takes a deeper dive into the definitions of digital twins as they relate to GRCA activities.

  • Expert Authors

    Written by a team of experts in the field who have applied these principles in various industries.

  • Change Agents

    Change Agents can come from anywhere on the org chart. These papers directly address how to lead and implement change no matter your role or title.

About the Resource

The metaphorical lens of birth, life, and death provides a profound framework for understanding the life cycle approach essential to effective IT governance and assurance. The journey through this paper reveals that, much like the natural world, the digital ecosystem thrives on cycles of renewal and termination. This life cycle perspective is not merely an academic exercise but a pragmatic guide for organizations grappling with the escalating number of controls and the rapid pace of technological change.

The analogy of Earth’s population dynamics underscores a critical lesson for GRCA practices: without the periodic culling of outdated policies, controls, and assurance activities, organizations risk becoming overwhelmed by their own complexity. This paper demonstrates that embracing a life cycle approach—characterized by constant evaluation, renewal, and, when necessary, the retirement of elements within the GRCA framework—is beneficial and imperative for sustaining organizational agility and resilience.

Digital twins emerge as a tool in this context, offering a digital mirror to reflect the current state of processes and systems and the potential for future scenarios. By integrating digital twins into GRCA activities, organizations can unlock a dynamic and iterative feedback loop where data-driven insights inform the creation, adjustment, and discontinuation of policies and controls. This technology enables a more sophisticated and anticipatory approach to risk management and compliance and facilitates a nuanced understanding of the product life cycle.

However, the application of digital twins in GRCA has challenges. The paper illuminates the complexities of implementing such advanced technologies, emphasizing robust frameworks to accommodate the nuanced feedback loops and life cycle management strategies digital twins require. The potential for digital twins to positively affect GRCA practices is clear, but realizing this potential demands a concerted effort to align technological capabilities with strategic objectives.

Bill Bensing
Alex Honor
Bill Bensing

Bill Bensing

Bill Bensing tranforms Shadow IT into legitimate software development organizations. Bill's recent thought-leadership is proving software devliery velocity and highly secure and compliant software are not mutally exclusive. He lives in Tampa Bay, FL, area.

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Alex Honor

Alex Honor

Alex Honor is a seasoned leader and technologist with extensive experience in all facets of project leadership, development, and operations for online software systems. As a practitioner and evangelist of lean-based management methodology, he focuses on reducing product development and delivery cycle time while minimizing waste and maintaining high quality standards. Throughout his career, Alex has developed both proprietary and open-source software projects, including tools, frameworks, and end-user applications, to streamline IT application life cycle processes. He has direct experience working with large-scale financial, government, enterprise, and social online application environments. Alex is skilled in defining strategies and designing solutions to support the migration from traditional data centers to virtual and cloud-based infrastructures. Passionate about innovation, Alex contributes to the development and application of next-generation tools, distributed multi-agent systems, and knowledge representation/acquisition tools. His expertise spans across various domains, including accounting, finance, human resources, IT, applications, facilities, strategy, contracts, and CRM. He has worked with platforms such as Quickbooks Online and Salesforce. Alex’s specialties include product development and marketing, software development management, technical operations management, enterprise architecture, and management consulting. With his diverse skill set and experience, he is well-equipped to drive success in any organization.

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