Transforming Compliance: A Tech-Driven Journey to Better Business Operations

Welcome to our first post! This series of blog posts will explore the world of international regulations and how technology can be used to not only improve your organization's compliance but also make it more efficient!

TL;DR

Organizations of all sizes struggle with regulatory compliance, spending billions on inefficient processes. Neosofia aims to solve this by developing open-source tools for policy validation and evidence aggregation, making compliance by design achievable and affordable for everyone. ¹

Why are we doing this?

Companies of every size, from startups to large enterprises, struggle with their compliance and collectively spend 250+ billion on proving they are compliant or getting fined for not complying. For each regulation, you need a group of individuals within the government to write, maintain, and enforce it; each company needs a group of individuals to interpret, document, implement, prove, and maintain their compliance; lastly, you need an independent party to review (audit) and certify that they are compliant. Despite decades of technological advancements, this process is still grossly inefficient and error-prone.

The first challenge that companies face is that regulations are typically vague and leave out practical real-world guidance, leading to hidden implications and false assumptions. For example, even after 30+ years of maturation regarding something as "simple" as password length (length > complexity), you can ask 10 auditors how long a password should be and still get 20 answers. Not only do auditors disagree, but each of the tens of thousands of companies that must comply are left to spend resources interpreting each regulation, implementing what they think is the correct interpretation, only to be told by auditors that their interpretation is incorrect. Password length is just one example out of thousands that compound into wasted effort across multiple organizations.

Even if your organization correctly interprets every regulation, the second challenge lies within policy alignment within the organization. In the real world, the actual implementation of a policy/procedure versus what is written in a text document rarely matches. Employees aren't trained, don't care, or are not interested in "slowing" themselves down to comply as their productivity, not compliance with regulations, is measured and used to determine their yearly bonus/promotion/raise. Companies also fall into the trap of writing a bunch of standard operating procedures to appease auditors but fall short in terms of training and enforcing those procedures as they, too, like employees, just want to "go faster". In our capitalistic society, many organizations take a risk-based approach to compliance and will eat fines or lose clients as the expense needed to comply would have been more than the probability of being caught and fined!

There are some compliance companies that focus on a specific vertical or horizontal market, but nobody provides you with open tools and guides to be able to visualize the relationship between your industry (vertical), the horizontals (security, monitoring, etc.), applicable regulations, your policies/procedures, and evidence to prove you're operating in a compliant manner.

Given a magic wand, I would wish for an environment in which every employee has the tools they need or want to effectively do their job. Compliance would be a "free" byproduct of all business operations. I would also wish that every piece of compliance evidence be available for inspection at any time. Essentially, I want compliance by design (CBD) for free, without any loss in efficiency or fun for the organization and its employees.

What are we doing to help?

Neosofia will be building two compliance tools -- a policy validation and evidence aggregation service to help organizations of any size prove they are compliant. Both tools will be open source and free to use in a self-hosted model with an option to pay for additional hosting models and services. The goal is to make adopting a compliance by design way of thinking as painless as possible with a turnkey open source solution. Compliance for all!

Neosofia will also open source our business operations because we want other organizations to benefit from our compliance journey and help lower the startup investment bar by providing a real-life example of CBD. We'll also push the boundaries of operational automation and process efficiencies to create a leaner organization focused on its core competencies.

How will we know when we are done?

We're done when any company, in any regulated industry, can use the tools and guides we created to prove their compliance to any auditor at any point in time with little to no operational overhead. We're done when technology startups have an easy-to-use template that they can apply to their own businesses and be compliant on day 1 of their existence.

What is next?

The next post in this series will give a high-level overview of what compliance means and mark the start of our compliance journey together.

Summary generated with GitHub Copilot ↩