By Maurice Gilbert, CEO and Founder of Conselium
With proper compliance and corporate governance becoming such a high priority subject for most companies in lieu of new SEC and DOJ regulations and enforcement, compliance officers have now become more valuable than ever to organizations and should begin taking on a much more active role in the guiding and development of company strategies as they may conflict with issues of a compliance nature. Perhaps the most important resources available to help back these officials in their responsibilities are the corporate records which contain a great deal of highly valuable and pertinent information relevant to aiding compliance professionals as they seek to advice their superiors. However, given a more effective approach to the management of these records, compliance officers could become a great deal more effective and efficient in their duties.
These records are made up of documents, and those documents contain important data necessary to the decision making process with regard to compliance matters. However, one fact which many companies fail to recognize, and one which only makes matters more difficult for compliance professionals, is the distinction between documents and records, and the fact that document management does not equate to records management. While companies may invest time and effort into the implementation of systems which seek to manage records by requiring the creation, storage, organization, and eventual disposal of physical documents, even given the best of systems, it still falls to the compliance officer to sift through these documents, searching them for the necessary data. Ideally, companies should seek to combine records management with data management into a well-organized and catalogued system. Without such a method, these processes will never be as efficient as they should be.
Using a manual system to seek out specific data within documents can take an inordinate amount of time and be opening the company up to unnecessary compliance risks through the failure of their ability to efficiently locate certain information. In order to avoid such a scenario, companies must being implementing new digital document storage systems which creates electronic copies of documents from which necessary data can be mined through a more highly efficient, automated means. Such improvements can have far reaching benefits for a company’s compliance program by cutting down on time and improving the quality of informed decision making by allowing such decisions to be made given all the facts as they apply to the organization.
Companies looking to implement such a system will need to begin by assessing their current methodologies, as well as their needs. Here, they should start by looking at how these materials are stored, whether they are working from physical or digital copies, and what type of organizational filing system is in use. Next, companies should ask themselves how accessible this information is, based on if there is an index, whether or not there is an app to make these documents searchable, what kind of database is being used, and what are its parameters. Finally, they will need to look at how this information is being used, looking at what information is most commonly sought, how it is shared, and if this information is driving organizational processes.
As the current trend towards better corporate governance continues, the need for compliance professionals to be able to access a wide range of information as quickly and efficiently as possible will only continue to grow. Soon, if companies hope to stay up to date and not find begin putting themselves to unnecessary risks, they will need to be able to ensure that these matters are handled now in order to safeguard themselves against any risk management threats that may be just over the horizon.
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
