Turning Static, Fragmented, and Control-Based GRC into an Integrated, Adaptive, and Culture-Aligned GRC Digital Value Management System®
Rick Lemieux – Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of the DVMS Institute
Introduction
Modern organizations operate in a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). Traditional approaches to governance, resilience, and compliance (GRC) often rely on siloed, checklist-driven processes that create friction rather than coherence. These fragmented systems struggle to adapt to the evolving digital threat landscape, regulatory changes, and rising stakeholder expectations for trust.
The DVMS Institute’s Certified Training Programs teach organizations the skills to turn static, fragmented, and control-based (NIST, ISO, ITSM, GRC, etc.) Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) programs into an Integrated, Adaptive, and Culture-Aligned GRC Digital Value Management System® capable of enabling digital business operations during digital disruption.
Through the DVMS MVC, CPD, and 3D Knowledge Models, the DVMS transforms existing GRC programs into an integrated, adaptive, and culture-aligned GRC Digital Value Management System® designed to power Operational Resilience, Regulatory Compliance, and Digital Trust across complex supply chains.
Enabling an integrated, adaptive, and culture-aligned GRC system demands more than frameworks—it requires the seamless connection of Strategy, Governance, and Operations, supported by active participation from every member of the digital ecosystem. Together, they anticipate and mitigate the systemic risks that threaten the digital enterprise’s resilience, compliance, and trust.
By adopting this forward-looking, integrated, and culture-aligned approach to governance, risk, and compliance, businesses are positioned to:
- Maintain Operational Stability Amidst Constant Digital Disruption
- Deliver Digital Value and Trust Across A Digital Ecosystem
- Satisfy Critical Regulatory and Certification Requirements
- Leverage Cyber Resilience as a Competitive Advantage
The Limits of Static and Fragmented GRC Systems
Historically, organizations approached cybersecurity and compliance as technical or regulatory problems. Governance was often reduced to board-level reporting, resilience confined to continuity plans, and compliance managed as a checklist exercise to satisfy regulators. These approaches produced several challenges:
- Silos of responsibility: IT handled cybersecurity, legal managed compliance, and executives focused on strategy, with little integration across functions.
- Reactive postures: Risk management was often about responding to past incidents rather than anticipating emerging threats.
- Compliance over trust: Organizations equated regulatory compliance with resilience, ignoring the broader imperative of maintaining stakeholder trust and protecting value.
The result was predictable: static systems incapable of adapting to rapid technological change, sophisticated adversaries, and complex regulatory environments. As the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 emphasizes, managing cybersecurity risk must be a continuous, integrated process aligned with enterprise risk management (ERM).
The DVMS as an Overlay for Integration
The DVMS is not a framework or a method; it is an overlay that sits on top of what organizations already do, exposing performance gaps and aligning activities to create and protect value concurrently. Unlike prescriptive frameworks, the DVMS adapts to the unique context of any organization—large or small, private or public—by applying systems thinking and holistic governance principles.
The overlay approach ensures that governance, assurance, planning, design, change, execution, and innovation—the minimum viable capabilities (MVCs)—are integrated into a single management system. This integration reduces redundancy, eliminates silos, and creates a coherent system of systems where culture, leadership, and accountability shape adaptive outcomes.
Turning Strategy and Risk into Strategy-Risk
One of the most significant contributions of the DVMS is the concept of strategy-risk: treating strategy and risk not as separate disciplines but as two sides of the same coin. This mindset shift acknowledges that any value an organization creates is meaningless if it is not appropriately protected.
Through the DVMS, organizations operationalize this concept by embedding risk into every strategic decision and aligning governance structures to support adaptive responses. This approach ensures that cyber resilience and regulatory compliance are not bolt-on functions but natural byproducts of managing digital business value.
The CPD Model: Creating, Protecting, and Delivering Value
At the heart of the DVMS lies the CPD Model (Create, Protect, Deliver), which reframes governance and compliance as integral to value creation. Traditional approaches treat protection as a sequential step—create first, protect later. The DVMS shifts this to a concurrent process: value is only real if created and protected simultaneously.
- Create: Align organizational strategy and innovation to deliver stakeholder value.
- Protect: Embed resilience, assurance, and compliance mechanisms to safeguard that value.
- Deliver: Ensure the organization can deliver value despite disruptions, adversaries, or regulatory pressures.
This concurrent model embeds cybersecurity, compliance, and resilience into the organization’s DNA, enabling trust and continuity.
The MVC Z-X Model and Minimum Viable Capabilities
The DVMS operationalizes integration through the MVC Z-X Model, which defines seven capabilities every organization needs: Govern, Assure, Plan, Design, Change, Execute, and Innovate.
- Govern sets strategic direction, risk appetite, and accountability structures.
- Assure provides oversight and confidence that activities conform to governance policies.
- Plan and Design translate governance into actionable strategies and architectures.
- Change and Execute ensure adaptation and delivery of protected value.
- Innovate drives continuous improvement and adaptability.
Mapping existing frameworks, standards, and controls to these MVCs reveals gaps and redundancies, enabling organizations to rationalize their fragmented practices into a coherent system. The result is a learning organization capable of continual adaptation.
The 3D Knowledge Model: Breaking Down Silos and Enabling Adaptation
Complementing the MVC Z-X and CPD Models, the DVMS 3D Knowledge Model provides the lens through which organizations turn static, fragmented GRC functions into a dynamic, adaptive management system. It frames organizational knowledge along three axes:
- X-axis, which captures past, current, and future learning
- Y-axis, which focuses on inter-team collaboration across silos
- Z-axis, which ensures strategic and operational alignment.
By encouraging leaders and teams to ask better questions—such as “How do we know?” and “Are we sure?”—the 3D Knowledge Model uncovers hidden assumptions, blind spots, and systemic weaknesses that traditional compliance checklists often miss. Doing so ensures that cybersecurity, governance, and resilience are not fragmented technical exercises but integrated, enterprise-wide practices. This multidimensional perspective enables the DVMS to transform compliance-driven organizations into learning organizations that continually adapt, embedding resilience and trust as natural business outcomes.
Phased Adaptation with DVMS FastTrack™
Recognizing that transformation cannot occur overnight, the DVMS introduces a phased approach called FastTrack™:
- Initiate: Establish baselines and prepare the environment.
- Basic Hygiene: Stabilize operations and eliminate critical vulnerabilities.
- Expand: Optimize practices across the enterprise.
- Innovate: Embed continuous learning and resilience.
This iterative, risk-informed progression mirrors agile principles, allowing organizations to adapt incrementally while building confidence and cultural buy-in.
Driving Cyber Operational Resilience
By integrating fragmented GRC systems into a DVMS overlay, organizations achieve cyber operational resilience—the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, or attacks. Unlike static compliance programs, the DVMS fosters resilience through:
- Systems thinking: Understanding interdependencies and cascading effects across the enterprise.
- Cultural integration: Shaping behaviors and mindsets so that resilience becomes part of daily operations.
- Learning loops: Using metrics (Goal-Question-Metric and QO-QM approaches) to improve alignment between strategy, risk, and outcomes continually.
This proactive orientation transforms resilience from a technical goal into a strategic capability.
Ensuring Regulatory Compliance
The DVMS also strengthens regulatory compliance by embedding it within governance and assurance rather than treating it as a separate checklist activity. Informative references from the NIST CSF 2.0, industry standards, and sector regulations can be mapped into DVMS MVCs, ensuring compliance is integrated into everyday operations.
This approach eliminates the costly cycle of “compliance theater,” where organizations prepare for audits as one-off events. Instead, it builds continuous compliance capabilities that are adaptive, auditable, and aligned with enterprise strategy.
Building Digital Trust
Perhaps the most powerful outcome of the DVMS is the ability to deliver digital trust. Trust emerges when stakeholders—customers, regulators, partners, and employees—believe the organization can create and protect value consistently. By shifting from siloed compliance efforts to integrated DVMS overlays, organizations build transparency, accountability, and credibility.
Digital trust is not merely a reputational asset but a business outcome that drives market competitiveness, customer loyalty, and stakeholder confidence. Organizations that demonstrate trustworthiness through resilient operations and transparent governance are better positioned to thrive in the digital economy.
Conclusion
The Digital Value Management System® represents a paradigm shift in how organizations approach governance, resilience, and compliance. By transforming static, fragmented systems into integrated and adaptive overlays, the DVMS enables organizations to treat strategy and risk as inseparable, align governance with execution, and embed resilience and compliance into creating and delivering value.
Through the CPD Model, the MVC Z-X Model, the 3D Knowledge Model, and phased FastTrack adoption, the DVMS provides a scalable, adaptive path to cyber operational resilience, regulatory compliance, and digital trust. In doing so, it equips organizations not just to survive the edge of chaos, but to thrive within it—turning complexity and uncertainty into drivers of growth, innovation, and stakeholder confidence.
About the Author
Rick Lemieux
Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of the DVMS Institute
Rick has 40+ years of passion and experience creating solutions to give organizations a competitive edge in their service markets. In 2015, Rick was identified as one of the top five IT Entrepreneurs in the State of Rhode Island by the TECH 10 awards for developing innovative training and mentoring solutions for boards, senior executives, and operational stakeholders.
In today’s digitally driven economy, cyber disruptions are no longer an “if” but a “when.”
The DVMS Institute’s Certified Training Programs teach organizations the skills to turn static and fragmented digital Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) into an Integrated and Adaptive Digital Value Management System® capable of driving Cyber Operational Resilience, Regulatory Compliance, and Digital Trust business outcomes.
The DVMS powers this adaptive and integrated management system by operationalizing existing best practice frameworks and standards (NIST, ISO, ITSM, GRC etc.) through the DVMS MVC, CPD, and 3D Knowledge models to deliver resilient, compliant, and trusted business outcomes.
Enabling an integrated and adaptive GRC system requires seamless alignment across organizational Strategy, Governance, and Operations, with active engagement from all members of a Digital Ecosystem. Each member plays a distinct role in proactively identifying and mitigating the systemic risks that threaten digital business operations.
This forward-looking approach to Integrated and Adaptive Governance, Risk, and Compliance positions businesses to:
- Maintain Operational Stability Amidst Constant Digital Disruption
- Deliver Digital Value, and Trust Across A Digital Ecosystem
- Satisfy Critical Regulatory and Certification Requirements
- Leverage Cyber Resilience as a Competitive Advantage
DVMS Explainer Videos
- Architecture Video: David Moskowitz explains the DVMS System
- Case Study Video: Dr. Joseph Baugh Shares His DVMS Story.
- Overlay Model – What is an Overlay Model
- MVC ZX Model – The MVC’s that power operational resilience
- CPD Model – Adaptable governance and assurance
- 3D Knowledge Model – Enabling holistic organizational learning
- FastTrack Model – A phased approach to cyber resilience
Digital Value Management System® is a registered trademark of the DVMS Institute LLC.
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