S5E8: 2025 ERM Vendor Compass, The New Enterprise Decision Layer
ERM has a perception problem, and in 2025 it becomes a performance problem. Many programs still optimize for completeness, annual reporting cycles, and beautifully formatted board packs. Boards increasingly optimize for something else: faster, defensible decisions under volatility. The market’s new standard is measurable and uncompromising: time to decision and time to evidence. If your ERM platform depends on manual synthesis to tell the story, the story arrives late, and leadership is forced to decide on partial facts.
In this episode, we unpack the 2025 IRM Navigator™ Vendor Compass for Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) and explain why ERM must operate as the enterprise decision layer. That means converting risk appetite into quantified thresholds and escalation logic, sustaining a living scenario portfolio that can be refreshed and reused, and reusing verified evidence from ORM, TRM, and GRC to produce board-grade outputs with traceability.
We walk through the IRM Navigator™ Model and place ERM at the Goals integration point, where strategy becomes decision routines, and enterprise signals are filtered into accountable executive action. Then we decode the Vendor Compass itself. Two axes, solution coverage and level of integration, expose which platforms can support true executive decision cadence and unify evidence with provenance, not just “share data.”
Podcast Episode Chapters
0:00 - From Compliance To Decision Impact
2:53 - Defining Modern ERM As The Decision Backbone
6:03 - Pressures From Volatility And Board Demands
9:33 - Two Credibility Tests: Appetite And Integration
13:33 - The IRM Navigator Model And PRAC
17:53 - Inputs, Outputs, And Board-Grade Evidence
21:23 - Evaluating Vendors: Coverage And Integration
26:43 - Interpreting Vendor Tiers And Fit
30:43 - Four ERM Solution Areas Explained
Vendors Covered:
Integrators: Archer, Diligent
Accelerators: AuditBoard, Corporater, IBM OpenPages, LogicManager, MetricStream, Mitratech, Riskonnect, ServiceNow
Pace Setters: LogicGate, Ncontracts, Resolver, Workiva
VC Sonar for ERM (Forward-Looking Market Scan)
This episode also highlights VC Sonar for ERM, Wheelhouse’s forward-looking scan of specialized signal providers and integration enablers that are not full ERM suites, but are increasingly critical to shorten time to evidence and accelerate progress toward more autonomous IRM. Examples discussed include Domo, Sayari, FiscalNote, Factal, Ironclad, and LinkSquares.
To access the full 2025 IRM Navigator™ Vendor Compass for ERM, visit https://www.wheelhouseadvisors.com/irm-navigator-research/p/irm-navigator-vendor-compass-for-erm-2025.
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Visit www.therisktechjournal.com and www.rtj-bridge.com to learn more about the topics discussed in today’s episode.
