Lee Dittmar is looking to start a conversation about governance, risk and compliance with Deloitte's new book Growing Confidence , which came out earlier this year. The book is the third Dittmar has contributed to in Deloitte's Straight Talk series. "We write these Straight Talk books about topics that are tough, controversial, sometimes confusing, sometimes on a topic that we're just really trying to change the discussion on. When we decided to write a book on governance, risk and compliance, we recognized that it was something everyone was talking about, but few were doing anything about." But Dittmar's out to change that, and as such, he recently spoke with Consulting 's Jacqueline Durett.
Consulting: Is the book in response to client demand?
Dittmar: The short answer is absolutely. We wrote this because at our clients, we'd be working with them, talking to them about what needed to happen around their governance, risk and compliance and how to deal with the unnecessary complexity and so forth. To be really blunt, often the work that you're doing in [the GRC] arena is not at the highest levels. And [we] needed to take the discussion up a level. We didn't write this because our clients asked us to write it specifically; we wrote this because it was necessary to advance the conversation, to advance the discussion and to help our clients better understand in very practical terms what the challenges were and what needed to be done—and why it needed to be done.
Consulting: What are some of the compliance issues clients are most struggling with?
Dittmar: I would say there's probably no place where you would go where you wouldn't hear, "Oh, compliance costs are a problem. It costs too much to comply." So this is an answer to that. One of the reasons compliance costs are so high is because they're dealt with in a fragmented way. They're fragmented in terms of their domain; they're fragmented in terms of geography; they're fragmented in terms of function or business unit. Consultants have been doing re-engineering for decades now, and this is an arena that has not really felt the benefits of business process re-engineering and technology automation. The challenge is the compliance issues were viewed as a hindrance to achieving those objectives. And this book basically says, "You know you're going to have to deal with regulation; it's a reality. You can't make it go away." So since you can't make it go away, you better be more efficient and more effective about it. GRC isn't a compliance issue; it's a business issue.
Consulting: The book talks a lot about the impact of the global economy as it pertains to GRC. What is the relationship there?
Dittmar: When we're operating on a global basis, we're exposed to more risk. Basically what's happened is we have more risk, we have more interaction of different types of risk and most importantly, the speed and the consequence of adverse risk events have both increased.
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