In recent years, GRC has developed from a static mandatory topic into a highly dynamic field of management. New legal requirements, stricter liability standards, international standards and technological innovations follow each other at ever shorter intervals. Many companies are responding to this by setting up a powerful, functionally integrated GRC department consisting of specialized compliance, risk and internal control functions. They standardize processes, maintain guidelines, carry out training and create reports. These experts want to fulfill the mandate of the Management Board and Supervisory Board as efficiently as possible and position themselves as strategic partners – and not as another “super silo”.
In practice, however, they come up against limits: communication, interfaces and technology limit the scope of these experts, reports often remain selective and dashboards fragmented. The day-to-day management work of the Executive Board and Supervisory Board thus remains decoupled from the reality of GRC in the company. This is precisely the difference to a genuine executive GRC. Executive GRC considers governance, risk and compliance not only from a specialist perspective, but also from the perspective of those who bear ultimate legal and de facto responsibility.
According to the liability provisions of the German Limited Liability Companies Act and the German Stock Corporation Act, managing directors can have their organizational and supervisory duties supported by the organization, but they cannot delegate responsibility completely to experts like any other value-adding function. They must be able to understand how risks develop, where disruptions occur in operations, how information is received and how countermeasures work on a day-to-day basis. This requires a structure that combines day-to-day management work with GRC practice in the company: not just quarterly reports or ad hoc crisis meetings, but an ongoing, structured view of responsibilities, tasks, information and measures.
A purely functionally integrated expert:internal GRC can naturally only build this bridge to a limited extent: it optimizes processes and content in its area of responsibility, but is often not fully integrated into the control logic of management and supervision. This creates an acceptance problem: GRC remains a “special topic” instead of part of management performance. In many sectors, this is no longer sufficient for the 2026 financial year and beyond. What is needed is an executive GRC that combines the cardinal duties of management with the operational GRC structures and thus strengthens both the controllability and the verifiability of precautionary measures.
This is exactly where VAlog® GRC comes in. The system is designed as an executive GRC approach that maps governance, risk and compliance structures down to job level, makes chains of responsibility visible and makes information, incidents and measures usable in an ongoing management and decision-making process. Instead of creating additional islands, the existing organization is translated into a talking organization chart and a GRC performance structure. This is reflected in dashboards and logbooks for management, supervisors and GRC officers.
This creates an approach in which Expert GRC and Executive GRC complement each other instead of being in opposition to each other. The experts retain their professional depth, while the management and supervisory board receive a tool that brings together their legal responsibility, their strategic management and the operational GRC reality. Companies that take this step are shifting GRC from a defensive compulsory exercise to an active component of good corporate governance. This is precisely the benchmark against which GRC will have to measure itself in 2026. Try us out.