Technology and Corporate Compliance
Wisetail | 3 min read
Technology makes everything easier — even compliance. With advanced automation and data tracking technology, streamlining your company’s compliance tasks improves safety, reduces liability risks, and keeps all your employees up to date on relevant regulations and certifications.
When compliance affects your bottom line, the right technology is critical to your risk management strategy.
Understanding compliance
Compliance is essential to business operations. Every company, regardless of size or industry, has rules to follow and risks to manage. Traditionally, managing compliance involved a lot of time-consuming, manual processes, including
- Extensive data collection, tracking, auditing, and reporting
- Regular updates to company rules, policies, and procedures
- Implementation of employee training and certification modules
- Safety inspections, procedural reviews, and proactive adjustments
Compliance is primarily preventive, so it can sometimes seem as though your compliance team is doing a lot of busywork for little return, but the consequences for noncompliance range from penalties and fines to lawsuits, loss of professional reputation, and even serious injury.
Corporate compliance
Corporate compliance covers the whole range of compliance measures to which your business is subject. The purpose of corporate compliance measures is to ensure your organization and all its representatives abide by every law, regulation, standard, and ethical practice that applies to your business and industry.
Corporate compliance practices cover local, state, federal, and international laws as well as internal policies and procedures. Compliance management processes identify potential violations and enact preventive measures to protect your business from punitive, and potentially expensive, ramifications. Compliance management is part of a comprehensive continuous improvement operation in which policies are evaluated and adapted as needs, rules, and applicable laws change. Regulatory compliance is the facet of your corporate compliance strategy focused on the local, state, federal, and international laws governing your business operations and industry standards.
The target of compliance regulations are those practices that disrupt safe and legal business operations. An inconsistent corporate compliance strategy exposes your business to loss, while an effective program improves compliance and keeps everyone current regarding relevant legal requirements. Technology is increasingly essential to compliance management in the modern workplace.
Technology for compliance tracking
Early compliance management platforms were designed to gather and secure compliance data. Today, these systems are packed with high-tech features for keeping your business aligned with evolving industry and government standards. Technology improves your compliance management strategy with tools for:
- Streamlining workflows for maximum accuracy and efficiency
- Organizing, storing, and reporting regulatory data
- Automating regulatory documentation, reporting, and submission
- Simplifying internal and external compliance audits
- Tracking training, certification, and other compliance related data
The future of compliance
Technology advances even as regulations and reporting requirements grow increasingly stringent. The future of corporate compliance is forecast to include the following trends by 2025:
- Responsive risk management. Risk management is your compliance team’s most critical function. Implement proactive, continuous strategies for adopting regulatory changes, identifying compliance risks, and fortifying your crisis management capabilities.
- Dynamic culture. Effective compliance management relies on a dynamic company culture with stated values for transparency, communication, adaptivity, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Compliance management works best when teams collaborate to actively create a company culture in alignment with internal and external compliance standards.
- Adaptivity. An adaptive corporate structure is agile enough to pivot quickly in response to change. Management technology eliminates redundancy, increases efficiency, and deploys smart automation strategies to create continuous change management capability in your compliance teams.
Compliance is not a set-and-forget operation. Even with advanced technology solutions on hand, risk management and corporate compliance demand current knowledge and constant vigilance.
Read more about compliance and continuous change management in our whitepaper.
