IBM OpenPages

Rethinking an antiquated tool for GRC monitoring & Analysis

IBM OpenPages solutions enable customers to manage risk and compliance initiatives, helping businesses to reduce loss, improve decision-making about resource allocation, and optimize business performance. Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) are three pillars that work together to assure that an organization meets its objectives.

We were tasked in redesigning the OpenPages interface, taking its current highly outdated UI into the 21st century with a UX sprint overhaul of the product. The final concept was presented to the OpenPages executive team and is being used to inform the future direction of the product.

TEAM

Chris Befeld - UX
Drew Smith - UX
Meghan McGrath - Research
Micah Stewart - Lead FED

Sprint Length 4 Weeks

Project Goal

Enable a business owner to quickly understand the risk & compliance exposure for their business, monitor for unwelcome changes, and make business decisions based on those insights.

"Librarian" Concept

Our first concept, titled "Librarian," was intended to encorage comparrison of risk data to gather insights into related metrics. This help some of the navigational problems that we heard about from risk professionals already using OpenPages but wasn't compelling enough to make business owners want to use the product.

"Risk-o-meter" Concept

The "Risk-o-Meter" concept excelled in many of the ways that our first concept did not. Business Owners loved the idea of an aggregated view of risk that they could check frequently without needing to search for relevant information. They also loved that trends could be visualized. But this concept lacked some of the detail that would be necessary to influence decision making.

"Outreach" Concept

The premise of this concept was to minimize the amount of time that the business owner needed to spend in the application and automate the mundane tasks involved with risk management by having the system reach out to relevant stakeholders. This concept was slightly unsuccessful due to the complexity and granularity of risk exposure and measurement, and an inability to aggregate exposure into one dashboard.

Final Concept

We pulled the best features of all of our previous concepts into our final, as well as some new insight into the way that business owners would like to view risk data. Business owners love to see the overall risk exposure of their business, but they also love to disect that number. Risk Category, Line of Business, and Geography are their preferred breakdown of total risk exposure. We chose to make our concept a mobile application to make it always accessible to business owners.

With our application the business owner can view the different breakdowns of their risk exposure, and when they see something they would like to investigate further they can drill down into the data. They can also view a history of that category's risk exposure, and even compare those levels to the levels of actual loss events.

Learn more about IBM OpenPages Here