It’s been great to catch up with the familiar faces in the GRC ecosystem. The community is growing but it's good to see continuity of many of the key people too.

The keynote session from Narina Sippy (Senior VP, SAP BusinessObjects GRC Solutions) and Tobias Dosch (Senior VP, ERP Solution Management, SAP Labs) provided an insight into SAP’s latest positioning for GRC. The focus remains on clarity for the enterprise and what's required to achieve that (insight, visibility, transparency). Narina shared her vision of the key steps to success:

• Align risks and compliance to strategy
• Leverage technology to deliver visibility
• Deploy methodologies that are sustainable

Tobias focused on the drivers for the CFO and shared the results from a recent Harvard survey. The top focus areas noted were:

• Financial planning
• Financial risk management
• Strategic planning
• Credit decisions
• Treasury

Tobias touched on a case study from SAB Miller who reduced their costs by $200 million, and grew their business by investing this saving elsewhere. They achieved this saving by identifying synergies in their global operation and reaped the rewards.

Dr Jurgen Ott from Allianz then gave a great overview of their roadmap to success and the journey they embarked on over the last 7 years. The change implications for a vast company like Allianz were significant but the benefits have been significant.

Interestingly there have been quite a few comments from people asking about our conference blog - it appears we have a bigger audience than apparent! More updates to follow.

Other meetings:

We've caught up with the Greenlight team and met SENSAGE. The Sensage offering will extend the power of SAP GRC and has great potential for genuine Continuous Controls Monitoring (CCM) in SAP. It’s been great to catch up with the team from the Customer Advisory Office (Luis Bustamante, Micheala Neuland, Peter Bunsc, Gary Dickhart), and Mahmud Mirza, Peter Johnson, David Hawk et all made us feel very welcome. It’s great to see that the SAP community recognises our efforts and focus, and is so supportive.