The Oversight of Oversight

When you look up the meaning of oversight, two definitions are provided: One speaks of surveillance, superintendence, inspection, charge, care, control, command, handling and custody and the other a failure to notice or do something, mistake, error, fault, failure, omission, inaccuracy or slip-up, blunder, faux pas, miscalculation.

The challenge of effective oversight is not an invisible one, but it can often fall between the cracks. Sitting in the peripheral vision of many and the focus of few, no one can argue with the need for it. However, its costs permeate the business in a way not easy to measure and with an efficiency even less easy to benchmark. There is little doubt, were these elements quantifiable, by now the issue would have drawn more scrutiny and new practices would have emerged to improve things. However, with regulatory demands increasing and the need for greater visibility having an almost linear impact on the oversight burden, the strain on the capacity of the business for oversight is causing people to look more deeply at the issue.

There are a number of challenges to consider and these are cultural, organisational and technical: Because the requirements of oversight are always evolving, flexibility is required and as a result, top-down traditional solutions to the issue are simply unviable. This is one reason why spreadsheets, whilst suboptimal have become the norm.

The linear nature in which the regulations have been applied and individually addressed has lead to inconsistency of data and duplication of discovery effort, with the application of variant approaches and formats to address the similar problems of different regulations.

It seems like sometimes the line of business has been the obedient servant of compliance. Often it seems to literally perform the task demanded of it, instead of taking the time to qualify the specific outcome required and then working to address the challenge in the most efficient way.

Oversight traverses standard reporting lines. This means that not everyone shares the same perspective of priority. SLA's need to be agreed to address this, but this also requires workflow transparency and the ability to escalate effectively.

Some of the key questions that need to be answered are:

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• What can be automated to make things more efficient?
• How can data be shared and consolidated more effectively to reduce repetition?
• How can the organisation be empowered to achieve this without significant upheaval?
• How might it be able to start with any simple or complex oversight challenge and evolve on that basis?

When you step back and think about it, managing the many elements of oversight across a regulated business can appear complicated, but then when you distil it down into its constituent parts, it becomes clear that it is in the orchestration and record keeping that the issues of complexity arise and its here where the solution to that complexity can be found.

PRIMED: Reducing the cost, extending the reach and ticking the box of good governance.