Business

Monitoring Compliance in Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) has become an essential factor for creating new business opportunities, allowing companies to make informed decisions, and making accurate sales and revenue forecasts.

Thanks to big data implementation, companies can take advantage of both structured and unstructured data by collecting, processing, and interpreting it.

We’re talking about massive amounts of information, that is, data sets too vast and complex to be analyzed using traditional tools and methods. 

Apart from the technical challenges of making the most of business intelligence, companies also struggle to keep pace with the ever-changing compliance regulatory requirements and laws.

The fact that every single business, big or small, collects and stores huge amounts of sensitive customer information means that they have to go out of their way to protect it, ensure transparency, and establish regulatory compliance.

What Is GRC?

In order to ensure transparency, trust, and regulatory compliance, it’s necessary to have a proper GRC (governance, risk, compliance) strategy in place.

Given that collecting, storing, and analyzing big data is an overwhelming and resource-intensive task, it’s necessary to implement a GRC platform that will allow you to centralize your data, and coordinate your risk and compliance efforts with BI tools, this being able to generate detailed risk and compliance reports.

But, first of all, it’s essential to establish where all that data is stored, who was granted access to it, and what the biggest risks are.

Secondly, it can be very challenging to control and ensure the compliance of unstructured data, which is why companies need to pay attention to monitoring it using both innate functionalities of business intelligence systems and third-party tools.

Ensure Searchability

The volume of big data keeps on ballooning year after year, while the number of data sources increases too.

As we’ve already mentioned, this data comes from email, phone, social media, CRM systems, and instant messengers, to name just a few. And all those bits of information have to be coordinated in order to become actionable.

Processing all this information manually isn’t possible, which is why organizations have to create searchable databases so that they can quickly and easily find what they need without wasting time and resources.

It’s clear that automating compliance is indispensable.

How to Automate Your Processes

Using the right automation platform will help you speed up your business intelligence processes, detect suspicious activities, and monitor performance.

Here are some of the most important elements of an effective automation project:

  • Ability to import information from various sources so that you can have a comprehensive view of what’s happening with your data
  • Ability to detect suspicious activities that can jeopardize your system and compromise your security, thus leading to compliance failure
  • Holistic view of each entity such as a customer, vendor, or distributor, together with their risk assessment, transactional history, and the entire relationship they have had with your organization
  • Guidelines for employees to help them understand what actions they should take in any given situation
  • KPIs that will indicate increased risk exposure early on and enable compliance leaders to take necessary action and manage risk effectively.

Centralize Your Data

Data silos are among the most common issues in business.

The problem lies in the fact that every vertical collects its information using different tools and stores it in a separate database. This way, your teams don’t have a complete insight into relevant information, and that prevents top management from making data-driven decisions.

Needless to say, this results in revenue loss and other detrimental outcomes.

The power of big data can be leveraged only if it’s stored in a single, centralized repository and make it more visible to all decision-makers.

For example, email, social media, texts, and mobile calls are the sources of unstructured information, and their diverse nature makes it difficult for traditional tools to collect, process, store, and retrieve it. That’s why using advanced email archiving solutions capable of capturing and interpreting data from all these channels in a compliant and secure manner is a must.

All this would make it possible for an organization to keep its data synced into a single searchable database.

Resolve the Compatibility Issue

Given that all this data is collected from different channels, it’s only logical that it comes in different formats.

It’s particularly complex when organizations migrate from legacy systems and databases, as there’s a risk of losing valuable data that would otherwise be very powerful when used in a business intelligence system.

That’s why companies have to identify all the data formats they have used, currently use, and will be using, so that they can find vendors that will fit in their existing system.

When it comes to compliance, it’s worth mentioning that certain provisions of record retention regulations require that information should be preserved in its original format. In other words, companies that fail to deliver their records to authorities in a compliant format could be facing non-compliance penalties.

Therefore, take compliance into consideration when creating your existing and future business information strategies.

Bear all these factors in mind if you want your organization to benefit from business intelligence and avoid compliance issues.

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