Many organizations still rely on a hodgepodge of spreadsheets, legacy systems, and third-party integrations to handle regulatory changes. This tangle is the root of a problem that spreads its tendrils throughout the change management process.
Disjointed systems are inherently manual, no matter how loudly vendors claim to automate individual actions. Spreadsheets cannot coordinate with legacy systems or third-party tools. That leaves a manual process of ensuring that the information from spreadsheets makes it into various other systems. Whose responsibility is that? Does the duty fall to different individuals in different departments? Different individuals for varying areas of compliance?
“… despite significant investment in compliance infrastructure, many banks still struggle to operationalize regulatory change effectively. The result is a persistent gap between awareness of regulatory updates and execution of compliant action—a gap that increasingly draws the attention of examiners.”
Today’s monitoring tools do an excellent job of catching regulatory changes. Horizon scanning is the lowest hanging fruit. The issues arise in orchestrating processes required to enable compliance, including:
- Identifying your specific obligations under a new or updated rule
- Informing the relevant individuals of the update and the new obligations
- Determining how the updates impact the business
- Instituting the process and policy changes required to remain compliant
Per Forbes, “process orchestration involves establishing a consistent structure for how work progresses from start to finish. Instead of relying on individual systems or teams, it defines a complete process and applies logic that governs every step within it.”1 The first step in orchestration is a tool that enables it. Simply identifying a new regulation or a rule change is barely a beginning. Change management extends from identifying a rule change, through completing changes in policies and procedures (within a GRC or without one) required to maintain compliance—the full regulatory change management lifecycle.
Orchestration
Individual tools that tackle one aspect of this lifecycle can lock you in a silo. A tool may inform you of a rule change and then direct information about that change to a specific individual. But then what? It’s a manual process to identify exactly what that rule change means for your business and what changes need to occur to remain compliant under it. Workflows should not grind to halt waiting for individuals to act. Workflows should prompt and lay the groundwork for the right actions at the right time. Forbes again:
“Even when systems are connected, there is often no shared logic governing how work progresses across departments. When systems don’t coordinate the work, people need to—and that doesn’t scale. To address this gap, more organizations focus on how work moves across their operations, not just how data moves.”1
Change management automation tools that include attendant workflows let you create consistent regulatory change management processes enterprise-wide. You can both automate change management milestones then design and enact workflows around them to fit your business practices:
– Real-time monitoring and automated breakdown
Monitor and capture global regulatory updates in real time and parse documents into obligations and related information like definitions, clarifications, and exemptions. Automatically send this information to the appropriate individuals within your teams.
– Automatic identification of relevant changes and impacts
- Automated obligation change summaries
- Side-by-side comparison of old and updated rules
Compare regulatory obligation updates with your current obligations to automatically and accurately identify applicable changes. This eliminates arduous manual review processes and errors and opens the door for workflows aimed at operationalizing changes.
– Policy and control impact notifications
Integrate your change management automation tool with your GRC to notify policy and control owners of an obligation change that impacts downstream elements for remediation.
– Audit trails
Every change is automatically logged to provide defensible proof of compliance during internal and external exams.
Workflows in AscentAI’s Regulatory Change Management Platform complete the automation software by helping you orchestrate processes to better operationalize regulatory changes throughout your organization.
Regulatory change management automation demands a tool that engages the entire lifecycle, that tells you not only what changes, but how the change impacts your organization, and the actions specific individuals must take to eliminate the risk of non-compliance. It demands workflows that let you orchestrate and operationalize changes in a timely manner, efficiently, and consistently.
