At Blueprint, we spend a lot of time interacting with clients and prospects who are tasked with ensuring compliance and mitigating risk for their organization. We see firsthand how regulatory change is managed, or in most cases overlooked.
A life spent managing compliance is similar to a life in the trenches – days are long, mistakes are costly, and errors seem to come with the territory. It probably doesn’t surprise you to learn that the majority of companies – even large enterprises in highly regulated industries – still rely heavily on outdated tools like Excel and Word documents to manually input and track compliance requirements.
With nearly 150 new regulations introduced each day, the world’s largest organizations pour an abundance of time and resources into regulatory change management. Still, if they continue to rely on outdated methods and technologies, they’ll be fighting a losing battle.
In the era of digital transformation, organizations have never faced higher compliance and security risk and it’s time to adapt. In today’s market, a single missed requirement can cost organizations millions, if not billions, of dollars in fines, bruised reputations, and legal fees. The stakes have never been higher.
Even more so, with the incidence of Shadow IT on the rise, this issue has become more urgent than ever. Business units – HR, Finance, Marketing – are running amok in the cloud, downloading applications without approval in order to get their jobs done, and racking up significant IT costs in the process.
You may be asking yourself, where do we go from here? What’s the first step? The answer is simple, now is the time to act. Before we continue I want to assure you that all hope is not lost -but the first step in solving any problem is admitting there is one.
So, let’s dive in.
First, let’s discuss the criticality of your data and the possibilities of AI:
AI is the future, but in order to benefit from it down the road, you need to embrace your data in the present. You need to ensure the persistence of your data in a unified, accessible, secure repository. This should be your starting point – ensuring that the information you used to track through your spreadsheets, word documents and sticky notes are not thrown away, and are instead maintained in a robust online repository.
Making investments in your data today will allow you to leverage AI capabilities in the future, like Blueprint’s Intelligent Recommendation engine that will proactively suggest regulations that should be considered in your value stream.
Rather than relying on error-prone, time-consuming manual processes to identify and interpret regulations, you can leverage natural language processing to automatically ingest regulations. This capability allows you to parse regulations into easily consumable components, helping you sift through the chaos and confusion. Once the data has been ingested and persisted in a repository, downstream activities can be further automated and streamlined.
Next on our list is – Robust Interpretation:
Regulations are complex. They are difficult to understand and often ambiguous. No matter how great we are at our jobs we all have off days. For most of us, an off day may mean more work for the rest of the week, or a scramble on Friday to meet that deadline. However, in the world of compliance, an off day could mean facing exuberant fines and putting the organization at significant risk.
Blueprint RCM helps you mitigate that risk. RCM automatically breaks down regulatory information and presents it to you in discrete obligations that can be easily managed and prioritized.
Stakeholders can collaborate on their interpretations, through in-line discussions. These breakdowns, interpretations and discussions are all permanently recorded, helping others understand why decisions were made, providing complete traceability and auditability across the organization.
Conclusion:
At Blueprint, we work with the world’s largest organizations to help standardize compliance activities through automated workflows. It’s time to remove the highly manual, labor-intensive, spreadsheet-driven process that makes it impossible to keep with up with regulatory change.
The ball is in your court, and it’s time to take control. Regulatory change management doesn’t have to be a daily battle, you have the power to operate differently. I’ll leave you with this, right now you’re on a sinking ship – are you going to sink or swim?
