Customer Insights 2023: Fusion’s March Community Exchange Round Up

At Fusion, we are determined to enhance our customers’ risk and resilience programs. One way in which we do so is through our portfolio of ENGAGE events, such as our weekly Community Exchange sessions, which have been curated specifically for our customer community, ENGAGE.

Fusion’s multitude of ENGAGE events, including our virtual Community Exchanges, serve as great opportunities for our customers to expand their networks and keep informed about Fusion’s product capabilities, enhancements, and roadmap direction. By specifically attending our weekly open forum-style Community Exchanges, our customers are able to hear about and share industry trends, experiences, and ideas as to how to progress their programs forward.

The level of customer participation that has been taking place during our Community Exchange sessions has been so inspiring that we wanted to shed some insight on the topics that are being discussed. Weren’t able to join one of our March 2023 sessions? Not a problem – we’ve got you covered! Let’s dive into the various informational topics that were discussed in March.

Simplifying the End User Experience

Effective resiliency training allows end users to actively learn how to use software, such as the Fusion Framework® System™, in a simplified manner. During this Community Exchange session, Fusion had six (that’s right, SIX!) of our customers, all from different organizations, come on as guest speakers to emphasize the importance of thinking about end users when creating training courses. The discussion primarily centered around:

• Basics and best practices for simplifying end user experiences
• What Fusion recommends and can offer in terms of end user training
• The benefits of Fusion’s Guided Workflow capability

Aside from these jam-packed discussion topics, our speakers also talked about the benefits of continuous Salesforce Lightning training, and our product experts demonstrated how to easily customize user navigation within individual Lightning apps.

Show and Tell: Community Members Share Effective Training Approaches for End Users

When it comes to risk and resilience, it is critical that adequate training is created in order to ensure that end users fully understand their program(s) and know what is expected of them.

Keeping this in mind, we followed the extremely engaging Community Exchange session of the previous week with another session that also focused on end user training! We had another guest speaker lead the discussion, with numerous other customers chiming in to talk about the type(s) of:

• Training that they offer as part of their resilience programs today
• Fusion-specific training they offer as part of their current resilience programs
• End-user Fusion training that they use(d)

Fusion’s product experts also showed an example of a Fusion-focused training course that has been created to ensure end users’ successful completion of the learning objectives that have been assigned to them as part of their roles.

Third-Party Risk Management

Understanding which third parties play a critical role in your ability to deliver products or services is crucial so that you can prioritize efforts and mitigate issues as they arise. During this Community Exchange session, a Fusion product expert discussed why it is crucial to:

• Eliminate siloed vendor management and instead engage your entire business and third parties by:
  • Collaborating with your cross-functional teams that depend on third-party vendors
  • Working with your third parties to drive necessary improvements
  • Driving accountability across teams
  • Sharing your risk data across teams in order to make informed, strategic decisions
• Proactively sense potential disruption by:
  • Reviewing what activities are in place that enable you to proactively respond to potential threats
  • Gaining an in-depth understanding of your third parties across key risk categories
  • Determining what practices you have in place to uncover critical threats that may arise once a vendor is onboarded
• Know who your critical vendors are and the impact that they can have on your business by:
  • Understanding which third parties are the most critical to your end-to-end operational ecosystem
  • Knowing which third parties are critical to delivering important products/services
  • Determining the level of criticality of your vendors and keeping your teams informed about this
• Further your risk intelligence by:
  • Determining what data you’re collecting and how it helps you make informed decisions about your third parties
  • Monitoring emerging risks or threats to resilience on a real-time, ongoing basis and responding with to them with agility
  • Understanding which sources you’re consistently collecting risk data from about the third parties that you’re vetting

Being able to drive value within your third-party risk management program, as well as your entire business, in the face of ongoing challenges has never been more necessary.

Operational/Enterprise Effective Risk Management Approaches & Strategies

Risk is a journey, and each organization is at a different level. During this Community Exchange session, Fusion’s product experts showcased the majority of the Fusion risk space to drive conversations and provide holistic views of the following:

• Risk capturing via Fusion’s home dashboard, including how to view your:
  • Controls + mitigation
  • Risk tolerances
  • Risk ratings
  • Key indicators
  • Aggregated risk exposure (organizationally)
• Your organizational hierarchy (“knowing your organization through and through”), including understanding:
  • Who your key stakeholders are and what they need to capture/see
  • Your gap analysis – and who is responsible for those risks when those tolerances are exceeded
  • Which individuals are viewing the risk data at different levels of the organization
  • Issues management (this provides an enterprise-level perspective and usage, allowing the tracking/multi-faceted view to remediate/track as well as drive accountability of the issues and tasks)
• Taxonomy (this needs to be the focus and driver from a journey perspective, regardless of the maturity of your organization’s risk posture) and includes:
  • Risk categories
  • Control categories
• Risks, including:
  • Risk assessments (these are critical to perform as organizations have different impacts, assessment criteria, and operational assets)
    • Impact x Likelihood x Controls = automated ratings based on responses to then react to these inputs

Fusion is “client 0” of our risk program, and we’ve been able to utilize our own product extremely effectively to track our risks at all necessary levels. Whether you are just starting to build your risk management program from the ground up and are learning the basics/definitions, or you already have a mature risk program in place, it is critical to consistently try to understand and determine where your organization needs more focus in its personalized risk space.

Effective Ways to Utilize Communities

Communities is Fusion’s digital space for collaboration with customers, partners, and employees that engages your entire team – from the front line to third parties to the boardroom – with experiences that make managing risk easy. During this Community Exchange session, Fusion’s product experts dove into our Communities functionality.

In general, Fusion sees two primary use cases for Communities: approvals and vendors. With this in mind, the ultimate goal of Communities is to:

• Break down silos
• Create dynamic data

Aside from approvals and vendors, there are many other uses for Communities that our customers shared, including:

• The ability to create a security structure
• Reporting/tracking
• Use of personas and how they might affect objects/data sets
• The risk management functionality
• Sending out risk assessments to third-party vendors

With full operational context at your fingertips and built-in collaboration, your extended team is empowered to keep disruption at bay with the help of Communities.

Connect and Learn Through Fusion’s ENGAGE Events!

We hope you enjoyed reading about our informational and engaging March Community Exchange sessions! If you would like to attend any of our future Community Exchanges, please register for them here.

Interested in diving deeper into each of the sessions covered? The recordings are available on Fusion Central.