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Regulation & Compliance

InfoGov Basics / Challenges / Regulation & Compliance

Organisations are under an ever increasing amount of scrutiny. Today, there are countless government regulations, industry standards and company procedures that have to be met. In fact, industry experts suggest that a global organisation can face up to 15,000 separate regulations that mandate the specific handling of information.

While the high profile failures of companies such as Enron and Lehman Brothers has led to more stringent financial and data protection regulations worldwide, regulatory compliance laws and regulations such as Dodd-Frank Act, HIPAA, ISO and FISMA all impose their own approaches to record keeping and auditing.

Companies are aware that poor information management and non-compliance carry heavy penalties and can lead to lost business and reputation, financial penalties and even prison sentences.

In some industries, failing an auditor’s inspection can lead to an organisation’s operations being suspended until corrective action is taken. Today, an organisation doesn’t just need to comply, it must be seen to comply.

Achieving compliance requires the execution of best practices without error as well as proving that the organisation has done this through accurate information.

Information Governance and Regulatory Compliance

Although different in strategic outcome and content, regulations – whether government, financial or industry – share common elements:

  • Governance structure
  • Assured and audited delivery
  • Ongoing measurement of compliance effectiveness
  • Internal audits and corrective measures
  • Records keeping
  • Process management tools
  • Compliance reporting

Given the over-arching nature of many regulations, it is not enough to simply implement policies and procedures. An Information Governance programme is required to overcome organisational, functional and process ‘silos’ in order to reduce risks and facilitate effective tracking, monitoring, reporting and auditing.

While often seen as a cost to the business, Information Governance should really be thought of as providing organisations with the opportunity to utilise regulatory compliance on order to drive their competitive advantage.

The Benefits of ‘Active Compliance’

The concept of Active Compliance has arisen from the understanding that the process of compliance means an organisation is already committing to industry best practices. Committing to continuous improvement, granularity and transparency enables an organisation to quickly identify areas for improvement and determine where investments can yield the best return.

The processes of automation and standardisation inherent in a Information Governance programme do not just drive down costs, they can also identify areas of compliance where small gains in business performance can deliver stronger market performance.

Key Areas to Consider

Archiving

Traditionally archiving has involved offloading data and documents from online systems to offline storage such as tape warehouses. This can make it difficult to search and retrieve information. Information Governance – combined with suitable technology solutions – enables consistent archiving strategies that make archived information much more accessible. Content can be searchable from a single system for discovery and audit.

Retention Management

Retention Management ensures that information is not retained indefinitely and that a lifecycle is enforced for a piece of information. Many organisational regulations – such as accounting and book keeping – have document retention requirements that must be adhered to. A retention policy should always dictate how long information must be retained for and what to do with that information when the period expires. The general rule of thumb is that information should be removed at the earliest allowable point.

Records Management

Records Management has always included management of unstructured data within an organisation. Today, this includes content in emails, online messaging and social media as well, all of which need to be classified and managed from creation to deletion. Within Information Governance, Records Management establishes the records policy and practices that are applied according to the business value of the content to that organisation.

Search

Many regulations – such as FOIA legislation in the US – compel organisations to produce information in very short timescales. In combination with archiving and retention, your organisation will need to establish how information can be searched and retrieved wherever it is stored. A workflow should be established in order to automate the review of returned information as well as packaging and delivering relevant search results packaged to requesting parties.

Business Process Management

Both Information Governance and Compliance requires some amount of business process management. Effective compliance requires overcoming the many organisational and process silos where relevant information resides. Information Governance helps here by installing centralised management of all information within the organisation.

Remember that your staff will require training and support in order to implement the required process changes. Best practice recommends making new processes and information access mechanisms as close to the employee’s natural work process to keep pace in the organisation and help to overcome any cultural resistance to change.
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