Compliance program maturity model

Once you have the results, you can move on to the next section to see a set of recommendations and action items for evolving and optimizing your compliance program. Regulatory Updates: The way in which an organization monitors, analyzes, and responds to regulatory updates and industry standards e. Collaboration: The degree of collaboration between the compliance team, operations teams e.

IT, engineering , and business stakeholders. Making sure that the right people are talking to each other at key junctures is crucial to getting to good compliance and good business outcomes.

Controls Testing: Controls only improve compliance outcomes when they are implemented correctly and tested regularly. Different organizations take very different approaches to testing, measuring, and ensuring the effectiveness of their controls.

Each organization will have a very different approach to collecting evidence. Level 1 organizations have minimal processes for managing their compliance programs.

These organizations do not try hard to keep up with regulations that may affect their market and industry. Evidence collection in these organizations is minimal. There is minimal collaboration between stakeholders. For example, the CTO of the organization may work with control owners e. The move from level 2 to level 3 represents significant progress in process maturity. The organization has a compliance program in place and is looking to expand the scope of their program, streamline their processes, and find efficiencies.

A Level 3 organization has a staff dedicated to monitoring regulatory updates and translating them into new company policies e. They also have staff dedicated to security measures e. Chief Information Security Officer. The level of collaboration between the compliance officer and their team and other teams such as IT and engineering is significant, which is a big change from level 2. Getting here requires an organization to spend significant time on stakeholder education. People need to learn new ways of working together and must understand the value of adapting new processes.

In the last few years, the concept has moved to the healthcare compliance industry. As a result, many Compliance Officers have been weighing the advantages of applying such a tool to their operations. This article will hopefully shed some light about these models. In short, a Compliance Program Maturity Model is a technique to measure the ability of an organization to implement continuous improvement processes for its compliance program.

It can also identify best practices and guides for organizational improvements built on observations about efforts to move the program through levels of effectiveness.

A Maturity Model can be best understood as an evolutionary process, at the end of which there is evidence of fulfilment of a desired target by defined levels of maturity and assessment of the extent to which factors are meeting desired goals.

There are many different approaches to Maturity Models; however, it should be a set of structured levels that describe how well the information and records management policies, practices, and processes of an organization have been implemented and whether they produce the desired outcomes.

It should define the characteristics of information and program management at different levels of maturity and provide guidance for staged progresses. Terminology may vary, but the stages or levels generally equate to the following: 0 chaotic, fragmented or ad hoc; 1 defining and structuring the program design; 2 laying the foundation of the program; 3 managing a fully operational program; 4 having a mature, sustainable program; and 5 an optimized program characterized by innovation and forward-looking means for continuous improvement.

The usefulness of a Maturity Model is dependent on the number of describing factors or details for each element at different stages. For example, the Strategic Management Compliance Program Maturity Model includes 15 factors for each of the seven elements of an effective compliance program. Each of the factors are measured across the levels described above.

The key point is that the greater the number of factors included, the more precise and useful the result will be. Conversely, the fewer the factors, the more generalized the issue, which in turn provides less value in the result. At Datica, we take this approach and leverage it to break down the maturity model to assess our privacy, compliance, and security independently.

We view Privacy as largely residing at the Policy level, with some input from Compliance in terms of external frameworks and requirements like GDPR in Europe. Procedures are coupled tightly with Implementation and both align with the functions of Security. The last two levels, Measurement and Management, fit with the functions of Compliance to continually assess, certify, and document necessary compliance artifacts and corrective action plans.

Scoring of the maturity model is complex and beyond the scope of this article. At a high level, each control, of which there can be hundreds, is assessed against the maturity model. For each control, each maturity level is rated as:. The percentage is supposed to coincide with a rough numerical equivalent. These ratings are then used to calculate an overall rating, which determines if you pass or fail the assessment. Full stack in this context means full stack maturity , or successfully demonstrating compliance across all levels of the maturity model.

Compliance needs to be ongoing and proactive, and the maturity model is a framework that can be leveraged to do that over time and to meet the myriad of new technologies, partnerships, data, and compliance tools. We used it to ensure consistency from policies, or privacy, through implementation, or security, to management, or compliance. We even classify the technology tools we use into the levels of the maturity model they help to address. An example of this would is the logging mechanism we use fits into implementation, the events we log into procedures and policies, and the documentation of log review into measurement and management.

We have had successful outcomes, and eased our external audit burden, by aligning and mapping our privacy, security, and compliance posture to a maturity model. For more information on compliance solutions, check out the Datica Blog. Additional questions? Contact one of our experts today.