Emerging Standards and Protocols for Governance, Risk, and Compliance Management

Effective Governance, Risk, and Compliance Management (GRC) software tools and software services need standards – for reasons of technical interoperability as well as reviewing, reporting, and auditing purposes. This chapter introduces an emerging standard for GRC metadata and metadata exchange, GRC-XML, on the background of standard frameworks for IT governance and risk management. This specification is then further analyzed with regard to its integration capabilities into the Object Management Group’s GRC related standards covering business motivation, management of regulation and compliance, business vocabularies, policies, and rules. Finally, the authors discuss in more detail the challenges to business rules applications and automated inferencing when governance, risk, and compliance issues need to be verified in practice. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-0146-8.ch035