The expanding compliance technology market

A plethora of requirements

The differing privacy regulations mean that businesses must manage a plethora of requirements in order to be in compliance. Data orchestration, meaning coordinating the flow of data throughout the enterprise, is essential to supporting compliance. DataFoundry from Infoworks is used for data ingestion, preparation, modeling, and operations. The operations module in DataFoundry handles governance as one of its functions.

“Privacy is a given now and will only get more stringent over time,” said Buno Pati, CEO of Infoworks. “California’s law actually has a broader definition of privacy than the GDPR does, in that it applies not just to the individual in question but also to members of the household. But companies cannot answer any questions related to data—what do you have, how did you get it, and what you are doing with it—unless they have organized it.”

In order to meet the growing demands for compliance with privacy laws, organizations will need to become proficient with locating, managing, and sometimes ultimately deleting customer information in keeping with the “right to be forgotten.” Finding and maintaining the talent needed to manage information is difficult and costly. “Automating these processes to generate a consumable form of data for any activity is going to be the best way to keep up,” asserted Pati.

One large retailer had built a system for data management in-house but found it difficult to manage because its customer data remained very fragmented and required too much manual intervention to produce a 360-degree view of customers across all its touch points. The retailer has now shifted to DataFoundry. “They consolidated all their consumer data, created a ‘golden record’ for each one, and were then able to put CCPA on top of it,” Pati remarked.

DataFoundry moves the data to a big data platform, on-premise or in the cloud, since the siloed source data is difficult to find. In addition, the dispersed data typically represents consumers in a variety of ways that make it difficult to determine whether it is the same person because there may be different email addresses, phone numbers, and initials associated with the same person.

Solving compliance and other problems

“What is interesting about compliance is that the problems associated with data management for compliance are the same ones they need to solve for other aspects of their business, such as customer service and experience,” explained Pati. “DataFoundry can automate data operations and orchestration to ensure that consumer data is readily available, auditable, and can be used to validate compliance with privacy and other regulations, but it is then also available for many other business purposes.”

Gartner reports, in “Compliance and Ethics 2020: Your Action Plan to Prepare Now,” that compliance slows other corporate functions 92% of the time, but that “compliance value is shifting from creation of static program elements (policies, training) toward the provision of real-time insight into changing risk and support for business and operating model changes.” With the enlightened use of solutions that provide compliance insights and enhance business performance, combined with ERCG software for efficient tracking and auditing, that percentage could be improved considerably.