How to achieve compliance

With a lot of enterprises being on the internet and having an international presence,many might be concerned with the legal state of their affairs, that would drive these organizations to identify which laws are applied to them, should they be concerned with the GDPR? or with American legislation? do they have to comply with multiple laws at once? After they answer these questions and identify exactly what laws apply to their enterprise, then the next logical step would be to comply to those laws.

There are multiple tools for enterprises to ensure compliance, each organization will take different measures to achieve this goal, here are some of the steps that are usually taken to establish compliance.

Written Policies

These documents should be developed by the organization to establish it’s commitment to comply with all the laws that are applicable to it’s work. A good policy clarifies the organizations expectations and articulates precise steps for it’s employees.

Procedures

Which serve as an operational guide to enforce the written policies, it should help staff to know which steps to take in different scenarios in order to stay compliant, this would bring uniformity to the operations and significantly reduce the risk of misinterpretation of the written policies.

Training and awareness

Once the procedures are established, the company would train it’s employees to follow these procedures properly, and to raise their awareness to the importance of, and the reasons for these procedures. Training helps employees to be more efficient and independent.

Technology tools

To make compliance the default, companies might want to use IT processes that facilitate following procedures and make them built-into their systems. Technologies such as AI and analytics help to achieve compliance more efficiently and effectively.

Monitoring

After implementing all of the previous steps, the company should try and follow back with it’s employees to make sure it’s policies are respected and procedures are being implemented properly, it can either do that by manual oversight or by using monitoring technologies. One form of this would be conducting an annual compliance audit.

It has to be said that coming up with compliance tools for your company and implementing them should be a team-decision, that is due to the huge impact it would have on budget and the actual extent of it’s efficacy.