New Software Feature
A Look at the Narrative Report Tool
When you’re presenting the results of a security assessment, you want to make sure the information you painstakingly collected gets into the right hands. Sometimes that means a risk dashboard. Sometimes that means a presentation. Sometimes that means a narrative report, which can take hours to write.
At Circadian Risk, we champion enterprise-wide dashboards and interactive data, but we know sometimes you need a narrative report, so we built a tool that can help you put one together quickly and easily.
Why a narrative report?
Narrative security assessments are the traditional standard, but they’re not always the first choice to communicate security data. Chief Security Officers (CSOs), for example, often want data visualizations. They have only a few minutes, sometimes even seconds, to dedicate to a security report. They want to see some sort of chart or graph that shows all their locations, what works and where security needs to improve. A CSO simply doesn’t have time to read through a lengthy narrative report.
However, the CSO is not the only person who receives a security report. Other stakeholders, like site managers and building owners, need more than simply charts and graphs. They want to see exactly what the problem at their site is, and how they need to remediate it. Those stakeholders can benefit from a narrative report.
There are also standards and regulations that may require a narrative security report, as well as grants and funding requests that may ask for a copy of the latest security report. For these reasons, Circadian Risk developed the narrative report tool. The narrative report tool joins our risk analysis dashboard and our project management tool, as one of multiple ways to document and report risk.
How does the narrative report tool work?
The narrative report generated by our platform is the written PDF that provides the specific details of your organization's security assessment.
Take the average security question asked by our platform. The four possible answers to every question are:
Compliant
Defincient
Non applicable
Non observable
The assessor also has the ability to provide more detail on items that need more information, as well as adding images, placing items on a map, or writing up an executive summary. All of that information is aggregated into a narrative report by our tool.
We also allow for customization. If you only want to generate a report that shows deficiencies and compliant items, for example, our tool will allow you to do that. Our tool can also show just the deficiencies.
Of course, the narrative report is visually appealing as well, with a white-labeled cover page, an overview of your company’s risk profile generated by our software, a floorplan of your sites, and any relevant images you’ve used during the assessment. You can also add the assessor’s biography and any necessary appendices.
Save time on your narrative report
The bulk of assessors’ time has traditionally not been spent on the assessment itself, but on writing the report. The benefit of our narrative report tool is that, instead of writing a report from scratch, you’re editing a draft our platform put together.
It’s important to note, however, that narrative reports are static. Once a deficiency is remediated, it will not appear in your document. Our other two tools — the risk dashboard and project management tool — are live, and able to show your risk and your remediations in real time.
Don’t need a narrative report but want detailed analytics?
Sometimes a static report won’t really work for organizations. Instead of a report that will not change when remediation is complete, our Project Management - Action Plans and Strategies™ will follow the life cycle of an item such as a camera or access control device all the way from inventory, to deficiency, to remediation. In other words, you will see an item go from non-compliance to compliance and all analytics, scores, and tasks will continually be updated to show your progression to mitigate and reduce risk.
Want to learn more about our narrative report tool? Schedule a demo today.
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