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The Risk Ignored – Part 1, Chapter 2: The Risk That Created the Category
It didn't take long. The software market found its opportunity once the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was signed into law. Vendors who had once built their businesses on knowledge management—rooted in workflow automation, document control, and internal collaboration—suddenly had something they'd never had before: urgency.
SOX 404 didn't just create a mandate. It created a narrative.
By late 2003, PwC—a global audit and consulting firm—had appointed a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) Practice Leader, becoming the first major firm to formalize GRC as a branded consulting offering. OpenPages, an enterprise software vendor specializing in compliance and risk management, issued a press release marketing its platform as a "GRC solution." Analysts took the bait. And seemingly overnight, what had been a faltering product category now had a fresh label, a growing audience, and a new group of buyers scrambling to meet audit requirements.
The acronym spread faster than the architecture.
And the risk, ironically, wasn't what these platforms were solving—it was what they were failing to acknowledge.
The Risk Ignored – Part 1, Chapter 1: The Software That Lost Its Market
It’s a metaphor older than the software industry and time itself: the emperor with no clothes. But before the emperor stood exposed, his clothes began to fray—tattered garments passed off as innovation, stitched together by marketing promises and untested assumptions. That’s the story we’re telling here, not just of the naked moment but of the unraveling that came before it.
In the early 2000s, that unraveling began with knowledge management. Later, it would continue under a new name: GRC.