Policy Management Features & Benefits

Centrally manage policies and control standards, map them to objectives and guidelines, and promote awareness to support a culture of corporate governance.

• Centralize Your Corporate Policy Content

  Archer Policy Management provides you with a best-practice framework for aligning and normalizing policies and control standards across your organization. It also gives you the structure to formulate new policy content appropriately based on your corporate objectives and the authoritative sources that govern your business. To augment your own policies, you can take advantage of the Archer Policy Compliance Library, available on the Archer Exchange. This Library is pre-populated with policies and control standards that Archer has developed in cooperation with Fortune 1000 clients, partners and industry experts to provide a best-in-class approach to managing IT risk for companies in any industry. You can utilize this content and easily tailor it to your organization’s needs, and you can import your full library of corporate policies and control standards to centralize them and eliminate redundancies. Using Archer’s automated workflow capabilities, you can enable collaborative review and ensure that all policy content is properly vetted prior to publication.

• Map Policies to Corporate Objectives and Authoritative Sources

  The Archer Policy Management solution provides a centralized repository for documenting your corporate objectives and the authoritative sources that impact your business. Through Archer’s point-and-click interface, you can easily align your policies and control standards to the corporate objectives and authoritative sources they support for rationalization purposes. The flexibility of the Policy Management solution allows you to add objectives and authoritative sources over time as your business evolves and new regulations, best practices and internal requirements emerge so you always have a meaningful understanding of what guides and governs you. The end result is a policy management program that adapts to the changing nature of your business, your industry and the regulatory climate.

• Communicate Policies Enterprise-Wide

  Once you have centralized your policy content, you need a vehicle for communicating it. With Archer Policy Management, you can publish policies online to all employees or limit content to specific personnel, depending on the nature of the policies and who needs to see them. Because policies are organized in an easy-to-understand tree format within Archer, your employees can quickly find the information they need. Archer also enables you to alert employees of changes to existing policies or new policies via email.

• Promote Policy Awareness

  Archer’s Training and Awareness functionality enables you to promote a culture of governance within your organization by communicating policy content and reporting awareness and acceptance across the enterprise. Through Archer, you can assemble, schedule and administer online policy awareness campaigns worldwide, and you can generate quizzes that test users’ knowledge of specific policy content. Archer also provides powerful reporting capabilities to communicate the results of training events to senior management and regulators.

• Manage Policy Exceptions

  With any effective policy management program, you need the ability to make intelligent business decisions about whether to authorize exceptions for a specific period of time. The Archer Policy Management solution empowers you to grant or deny exception requests based on the value of the control standard to your corporate objectives and governance program. Through Archer’s built-in workflow process, you can ensure that all exceptions are properly reviewed. You can also report on exceptions across the enterprise, monitoring them by control, department, severity or other meaningful criteria.

• Support Enterprise Compliance Initiatives

  Regardless of how you perform assessments, you need consistent, standardized questions to measure compliance with policies, control standards and, ultimately, the authoritative sources that impact your business. The Archer Policy Management solution sets the stage for performing meaningful compliance assessments by providing a bank of questions that are mapped to control standards within the Archer Policy Compliance Library. Your organization can issue these questions on a standalone basis, or you can use them with the Archer Risk, Vendor and Compliance Management solutions to deliver targeted, online assessment campaigns that map to internal controls and external requirements.

• Report on Your Policy Management Program

  Archer’s powerful reporting features give you an enterprise view of policies and standards across business functions and governance, risk and compliance frameworks. On an ad hoc basis, you can generate real-time reports to display policies and control standards mapped to specific regulatory requirements, identify control gaps and monitor policy exceptions enterprise-wide. You can also create user-specific dashboards that provide a global view of your organization’s policy management processes, along with work queues for policy and exception review activities.

• Reduce the Cost of Policy Management and Compliance

  By basing your policies on the Archer Policy Compliance Library and employing Archer’s automated workflow process for policy review and approval, you can significantly reduce the time and effort required to create and update policies, manage policy exceptions and demonstrate compliance with multiple regulations. Centralizing manual processes within a web-based solution results in increased workflow efficiency and a policy management program that keeps pace with the changing nature of your business.