Cooperative Compliance Across the Enterprise
Maintaining your compliance posture is hard work. There are many personalities and competing interests. Business Development wants to grow. Operations needs to be nimble. Product wants to innovate and be reliable. Legal strives to stay out of trouble. Leadership needs to manage the big picture. These competing interests naturally create silos of information.
One of the greatest challenges to a compliance program is mining these silos and associating them in some meaningful way to policy. Further complicating this, we recognize that the information and activity in each silo is dynamic often changing on a daily or weekly basis. Some examples include:
Onboarding and offboarding procedures
Data architecture diagrams
Customer service procedures
Devops procedures
IT procedures and support guides
Purchasing and finance guidelines
Policies are generally managed by legal or compliance teams. It’s not uncommon to see outdated procedures tied to policy to keep up with changes to each silo.
Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions
Departments need autonomy when writing procedures, runbooks and process manuals. Managers often use Word or Google Docs and distribute them via email or from a shared drive. Technical teams may opt for Confluence, Github (via readme.md) or Dropbox. These are all great solutions and should continue to be used, but they need some sort of glue to hold them together to ensure your policies have procedural coverage.
PolicyCo addresses this need by giving your departments independent access to write and share procedures. Department members are able to write procedures and submit them for approval to their manager. Managers can grant access to the department or extend access to the organization.
“Finally, the compliance team can stop chasing down outdated procedures. This means less work for everyone.”
Compliance needs to make sure procedures are current. Once a procedure is created, compliance can link it directly to policy. Now, procedures are maintained in real time by departments while legal/compliance benefits by eliminating the upkeep. It’s a win-win for the enterprise.
Policy can be exported with or without procedures attached, depending on the specific need. Further, employees can browse or search procedures with a lightweight mobile-friendly viewer improving knowledge transfer across the organization.
The Champion
Stop fighting the silos and embrace your various systems by recording where procedural source of truth lives.
It takes an operational mindset to address growing inefficiency in an organization. If you are the champion for your organization and are interested in solving this problem, we’d love to talk.
Cooperative Compliance Across the Enterprise was originally published in PolicyCo on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.