When Growth Meets Governance: Assuring compliance at scale

As organizations undergo digital transformation and global expansion, they quickly realize the need for mature governance and standardized risk and compliance practices. Without streamlined audit workflows and centralized oversight, these processes become increasingly complex (and risky) as operations scale.

One global SaaS data company found itself in this exact position. While expanding its workforce and modernizing its technology stack, the company still relied on manual methods to manage audits and gather compliance evidence. This resulted in duplicated efforts, inconsistent documentation, and limited visibility into risk, making it difficult to measure effectiveness or identify gaps. The absence of control objectives aligned to authority documents further complicated oversight.

Without centralized indicators, it was difficult to measure effectiveness or identify potential gaps. And the company hadn’t established control objectives to track across authority documents

When an Untapped License Becomes a Strategic Advantage

Already using ServiceNow for ITSM and HRSD, the company discovered an underutilized license for Integrated Risk Management (IRM), presenting a clear opportunity for a quick win. To strengthen its risk and compliance posture, the organization partnered with CoreX to implement a scalable, automated IRM solution.

The initiative focused on streamlining evidence collection, centralizing audit workflows, and efficiently managing policy exceptions. CoreX deployed ServiceNow’s Policy and Compliance, Policy Exception, and Audit Management modules to replace fragmented manual tracking and unify risk data.

Previously, the company managed compliance tasks in Excel, often with siloed ownership based on authority documents rather than control objectives. This resulted in disconnected workflows, where individuals had to chase others to gather evidence manually.

Evidence Collection (Without the Paper Chase)

In IRM, authority documents are identified, such as security and privacy ISO standards that need to be achieved with full compliance. These authority documents are broken down into citations and control objectives are how citations are met. The control objectives are linked to parts of the change management process.

Compliance in ServiceNow links control objectives to multiple citations, allowing for managing multiple authority documents by automating the evidence gathering process. The platform generates indicator tasks that continuously gather evidence information year-round, meaning in most cases, everything is already compliant when an audit happens.

Customizing the Deployment

The Audit Management Module allowed the company’s internal auditors to validate that the evidence gathering process met desired standards. CoreX also created a customization that provided a way external auditors could collaborate directly within Audit Management through a process that restricts the visibility of certain users, such as external auditors in this case. This meant centralized communications and documentation with external auditors.

In addition, CoreX implemented a custom approval workflow for policy exceptions, introducing a standardized and accountable process for reviewing deviations from established controls. These enhancements not only strengthened governance but also simplified collaboration across compliance stakeholders.

Beyond technology implementation, the project sparked broader change management efforts within the organization, laying the foundation for a more disciplined, scalable compliance culture.

Choosing Dashboards Over Duct Tape

With IRM in place, the company was finally able to measure compliance in a systematic, data-driven way. Evidence collection became traceable and aligned with automated indicators, replacing static Excel sheets with continuous monitoring. Even the simplest dashboards offered early visibility into audit progress and policy exceptions.

The shift from manual tracking to automated indicator tasks led to major efficiency gains. Instead of manually managing every control in spreadsheets, teams now rely on ServiceNow reminders to capture evidence automatically. Indicator tasks eliminate redundancy, ensuring that data is collected at the source, without repeated outreach to process owners.

The company now has governance established behind its exception policy, with authorizations and audit tracking of authorizations when requesting an exception to a specific policy control. This ensures correct standards are being met.

Already using ServiceNow for ITSM and HRSD, the SaaS company was no stranger to the ServiceNow platform, but by fully deploying an existing IRM license, it was able to improve policy adoption, centralize exception handling, and build data-driven compliance operations.