Report from the Compliance Week Conference: Who's driving effective and efficient compliance?
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Posted in: Risk Management
If I had just two words to describe this week's annual Compliance Week conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. they would be "efficient" and "effective." How do you introduce efficiencies into compliance activities thereby lowering the cost without sacrificing their effectiveness? Is one more important than the other? Your answer depends on how you factor risk into your compliance initiatives and requirements (risk was a hot topic at this year’s conference). Whether it’s efficiency or effectiveness, automation provides the means to achieve both.
Who’s responsible for driving efficiency and effectiveness into compliance activities: business owner or IT? I posed this question to a panel called “Aligning IT & Business Requirements: An Ongoing GRC Strategy” moderated by Lee Dittmar from Deloitte Consulting. The panel emphatically stated they believe the drive for process improvement should come from the business owner – not IT. Who are the business owners? Consider the possibilities: AML Compliance Director, the SOX team, CFO, internal audit committee, Chief compliance officer, Chief Risk officer, VP of HR, VP of Ethics and Compliance, Chief Counsel, and so on and so forth. Under the business-owner-drives model, they’re all supposed to be initiating and driving improvements by partnering with their IT department.
That sounds good, but the people in the trenches are looking for ways to get their job done under increasing pressure with less time and resources. A lot of Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Access applications are born of this frustration – I heard it more than a few times during the conference. The home grown approach makes compliance activities less efficient, less effective, and more prone to risk.
Who’s driving efficiency and effectiveness into your compliance initiatives?