Compliance often feels like it is set in stone, but the truth is that change does happen here. And, while it’s often slow, there are times when rapid shifts must be made. This is one of those times.
The evolution of key trends today requires that the compliance function evolves in specific ways.
Futureproofing Compliance
In this post, we’ll discuss five shifts compliance needs to make immediately:
A Shift in Value Drivers
In the past, compliance created value through things like training and policy creation. Today, that is changing. There is a focus on delivering real-time insight and guidance, risk identification, and providing support for the business. It’s a shift from static delivery to dynamic delivery, but this will require that compliance can rapidly identify relevant risks, manage risk efficiently, and be “change-ready”.
All business assumptions must be tested in order to clarify risks and to determine the underlying cost of compliance, as well as requirements for the business strategy.
A Shift in Role
Traditionally, compliance operates as a policy enforcer. This is a natural offshoot of the policy creation process, but today, compliance must change to become a business process coordinator, instead.
Rather than simply creating and enforcing policy, compliance must provide tools and solutions that support decision-makers in their journey toward understanding the true underlying costs of compliance and all that is required.
Risk Ownership
In the past, compliance departments were largely responsible for mitigating risk, but that is changing.
Today, more and more businesses are taking ownership of risk. In this situation, employees help one another avoid misconduct, decision-makers reward positive behaviors, and messaging focuses on helping employees exhibit positive behaviors in the workplace.
Compliance Delivery
Today’s organizations must be more agile than ever before. To support this, compliance must shift to a built-in format that combines the ability to coordinate with assurance activities, to assess for burden and integration, and to ensure that design is part of a business’s workflow.
Compliance’s guidance must be seen as a product designed for use during business decision-making, and as natural parts of business processes.
Creating a Compliance Network
Finally, compliance faces changing requirements in terms of access to skills, experience, and knowledge. In the quest to support this need, compliance will shift from a purely departmental format to a “network” format consisting of service providers that support traditional compliance competencies in specific, strategic ways.
This helps ensure that compliance has access to the new skills and competencies necessary, such as change management, automation, data science, analytics, project management, and more.
Shifts Correspond to Specific Trends
These five shifts correspond to specific trends affecting corporate functions today. These include the shift toward digital capabilities, reducing corporate function drag, scrutinizing data, process ownership, retaining talent, changing asset definitions, and fragmentation of regulatory frameworks.
By understanding these trends and the required shifts, compliance departments can evolve quickly, providing the support and guidance that today’s organizations require in order to thrive, grow, and compete in an ever-changing environment.
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