The Evaluation Gap

Tool selection processes obsess over feature checklists—workflow configurability, reporting drag-and-drop, SOC 2 attestations. Post-deployment audits reveal another story: unused modules, orphaned risks, metrics nobody trusts. The blind spots lie not in the UI but in organizational sociology, data lineage, and change saturation.

Seven Blind Spots That Sabotage ROI

1. Data Provenance Integrity
   Issue: Risk registers imported from spreadsheets lack timestamp lineage; audit trails break.
   Impact: Conflicting “source of truth” inflates reconciliation effort.
2. Control Taxonomy Drift
   Issue: Regulatory texts evolve; tool libraries remain static.
   Impact: Mis-tagged controls proliferate, undercutting automation.
3. Saturation of Notifications
   Issue: Alert thresholds default to vendor templates.
   Impact: Users mute emails, hiding true exceptions.
4. Shadow IT Integrations
   Issue: Power users bolt on scripts and RPA bots.
   Impact: Upgrades break undocumented links, spawning manual workarounds.
5. Behavioral Analytics Blindness
   Issue: Tools track process compliance but not user friction.
   Impact: Workarounds flourish undetected.
6. License Allocation vs. Risk Ownership
   Issue: Procurement buys seats for first-line managers; real process owners sit elsewhere.
   Impact: Reporting gaps appear exactly where board visibility is needed.
7. Cultural Fit Miss
   Issue: Highly prescriptive workflows collide with agile squads.
   Impact: Teams revert to Jira or Confluence, relegating GRC software to after-the-fact documentation.

Detecting Blind Spots Early

• Control walk-through labs – Run real incidents through the demo environment.
• Sociotechnical surveys – Ask users to rank friction points pre-sale.
• Event log mining – Post-go-live, analyze click-path entropy to surface abandonment.

Expert Perspectives

Forrester analyst Alla Valente stresses “governance debt”—latent mis-alignments that accrue like technical debt.
EY’s GRC architect Parul Desai notes that 30 % of remediation backlog stems from taxonomy drift rather than actual risk issues.
Professor Sunil Wattal (Temple University) emphasizes data usability as the core determinant of analytic success, more than mere volume.

Remediation Playbook

1. Quarterly taxonomy governance council with risk, IT, and legal.
2. Dynamic license orchestration—seat allocation driven by org-chart and risk heat, not headcount.
3. Alert hygiene sprints mirroring security’s “rule tuning.”
4. User-centric UX telemetry feeding continuous configuration updates.

References

Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, and Compliance Platforms Q4 2024; EY “The Hidden Cost of GRC Complexity”; ISACA Journal Vol. 6 2024; Wattal, S. “Information Quality in Risk Analytics”; OCEG Tech Stack Study 2023.

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