In today’s evolving digital world, effective governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) are crucial for organizations to maintain their competitive edge. For enhanced efficiency, ServiceNow’s Xanadu GRC offers advanced tools and features that allow organizations to navigate the complexities of risk and compliance easily.
This blog will help you understand recent enhancement and new functionalities of Xanadu GRC, highlighting its benefits and best practices for implementation.

Overview of ServiceNow Xanadu GRC

ServiceNow Xanadu GRC’s early availability started on 1 August 2024. It seamlessly provides a framework to manage risk and compliance associated with digital transformations. It merges different processes and tools in a unified platform, allowing organizations to automate workflow, enhance visibility, and facilitate collaboration across teams.
GRC helps organizations manage risk, compliance, and policy management processes. By dominating the power of the Now platform, Xanadu GRC allows organizations to access risk and update their government processes.
GRC streamlines inefficient processes in an organization into a unified risk management program. ServiceNow connects business, security, and IT with an integrated risk framework, transforming manual processes into a single platform.

Recent Enhancement in Xanadu GRC

The latest updates to Xanadu GRC bring new capabilities that provide usability and effectiveness:

  • Enhanced User Experience: The user experience has improved, making navigation more natural and interactive. This allows users to access critical information quickly and efficiently, boosting productivity.
  • Issue Grouping Management: Users can group and manage issues more effectively. Users can manage from a parent issue, whereas child issues inherit the value of ‘state, response, and explanations fields’ or manage them independently. A new field in issue grouping helps to identify whether an issue is a child, parent, or standalone issue and also specifies management methods.
  • Confidentiality and Inheritance Enhancement: While maintaining confidentiality standards, these enhancements help update the management of issues. Confidential child issues can only be added under confidential parent issues. If a confidential parent issue is changed to non-confidential, then all confidential child issues will be removed from parent issues, making it a standalone issue
  • Personal Data Rights in Privacy Management: It offers a configurable workflow that helps automate and manage data rights requests, like Data Subject Access Requests (DSAR).
  • Create Data Lineage in Privacy Management: This feature allows organizations to visualize data consumed and shared during processing activities which is essential for compliance and risk management.
  • Regulatory Change Management: This helps organizations track changes and assess their impact on existing policies and procedures. This feature allows us to maintain compliance and minimize the risk of penalties.

New Functionalities in Xanadu GRC

With the recent enhancement, Xanadu GRC introduced a few new functionalities to streamline GRC processes like:   

  • Automated Workflow: The user can automate compliance assessments and audits; it helps reduce manual efforts and increase accuracy
  • GRC Employee Role: With the new GRC employee user application, employees can be assigned a GRC employee role that allows them to read and acknowledge the organization’s policy reports and risk events, engage with the compliance team, and enhance their involvement in GRC processes.
  • GRC Licensing Summary Dashboard: This allows tracking license usage trends, with expanded data retention and archiving license consumption details.
  • Lite Operator Role Enhancement: This allows for better resource management within the GRC Framework. This framework shows enhancements for organizations looking to optimize resource management. By defining access levels and increasing task efficiency, organizations can better identify complexities in governance, risk, and compliance.
  • Entity Filter Deletion or Modification: This will alert users to the unintended consequences of deleting or modifying an entity filter.
  • Cloud Data Management in Audit Management: Cloud Document Management allows users to upload documents from their local computer to the Cloud. This feature boosts accessibility and determines the documents are easily retrievable.
  • User Enhancement in Audit Management: The audit approver role allows users to approve engagement and audit plans. The audit reader also helps users to view audit-related entities.

Benefits of Upgrading to Xanadu GRC

  • Efficiency: Automating processes minimize the manual workload, allowing the team to focus on strategic initiatives. While earlier versions had some features, enhancements in Xanadu1 GRC streamline workflow and help improve overall efficiency.
  • Improved Compliance: Organizations can reduce tasks and avoid costly penalties with compliance tools. Basic compliance tracking was available in the previous version, but the enhanced feature provides a more comprehensive approach.
  • Better Outcomes: GRC allows access to real-time data and analytics that enable informed decision making, which leads to better outcomes. Early versions had these capabilities, but enhanced features provide more actionable data and deep insights.
  • Audit Management: Cloud document management allows document handling and accessibility, and a new user role in audit management simplifies responsibility and user access control. These features were not available in the previous version
  • Issue Grouping Management: Grouping and managing issues allows users to handle related problems effectively. Basic issue tracking exists; however, earlier versions did not have a more sophisticated approach.
  • Automated Workflow for Compliance Assessment: Automating compliance assessment and audit maximizes accuracy and decreases manual efforts. Some automation existed, but enhanced features expanded capabilities significantly.

Also, read ServiceNow IRM: Balancing Compliance and User Experience.

Best Practices for Implementing Xanadu GRC

  • Define Clear Objective: Before proceeding clearly define your goals and ensure they align with the business objectives. Having a clear objective helps ensure a successful implementation
  • Invest in Training: One of the most common problems is a lack of knowledge and proper training. Ensure that you invest time and resources in training that serves different user levels.
  • Involve Stakeholders Early: It’s important to involve stakeholders from different departments early in the process. Their feedback provides valuable insights for ensuring the system meets everyone’s needs
  • Automation: Identifying repetitive tasks that can be automated, and freeing resources will help in high-value activities and reduce time with minimum manual risk.

 

 

Conclusion

ServiceNow’s Xanadu GRC represents a quick forward in governance, risk management, and compliance solutions. With the recent enhancement and new functions, organizations can better navigate the complexities of today’s environment. Businesses can enhance efficiency by upgrading to Xanadu GRC and following best practices for implementation. This advancement not only helps organizations grow but also promotes Risk Management and accountability.
Ready to elevate your GRC strategy? Partner with InMorphis, a leading ServiceNow solutions provider, to unlock the full potential of Xanadu GRC and drive transformative results for your organization. Contact InMorphis today for a personalized consultation and expert implementation support!

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