The GRC process at many companies, building on the Sarbanes-Oxley compliance process, has produced some side effects, notably the creating of lots and lots of data. The smartest companies understand that this data can be a treasure mine of strategically useful information. At a minimum, you want to systematize and display this data, providing useful, easy-to-interpret, real-time metrics that are relevant to your business.

So we're seeing a movement toward more robust visualization tools. Data visualization pioneer Tableau Software, for example, recently hosted more than 700 business intelligence professionals at its third annual Customer Conference. That was more than double the attendance of last year's event.

Lots of firms are jumping into this. This month, EthicsPoint launched a data visualization product, the epVisualization Manager, to better create GRC data in dashboards. The software displays existing data from a variety of internal sources--HR, internal audit, employee hotline and databases, for example--and adds various data feeds and email-based alerts. The result is a visual data "mash-up," enabling users to "view correlations between certain operational or environmental factors and the associated increase in risk."

Dashboards are bound to come up at your company soon, if they haven't already. My sense is that creating some sort of dashboard to sit on the executives desktop is a great idea, a way to constantly remind them of your value. A solid GRC dashboard would likely be welcome by CFOs and others.

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