If you’re becoming compliant for a certification like PCI, HIPAA, NIST, SOC or ISO, you have hundreds—maybe thousands—of line-item elements to take care of. One of the initial challenges is simply knowing which team members own what items. Most organizations use some type of manual process to assign each line item, one by one. It’s a long process that involves choosing from dozens of people, hundreds of times.
Your challenge is to maintain oversight, to hold people accountable for providing the right evidence by the deadline. That means you’re constantly herding cats and badgering employees.
Meanwhile, you need to keep up with all the submissions coming across your way. People are giving you the wrong evidence, delivering it with questions, and submitting it half completed. So even after files have been delivered, you still have to keep people accountable. It’s exhausting.
Using Stone Age Tools for Compliance?
You got into this space expecting to research new technologies and use them to do cool stuff. You wanted to move your company forward with digital innovations, to wield your creative energies and make a difference in your organization. But when it comes to managing security and compliance, it’s like you’re stuck in the Stone Age. That’s because you’re using archaic tools that should have been replaced decades ago.
Perhaps you’re using a sharepoint site, or you’ve manually created folders on a network drive. You’re tracking accountabilities in a spreadsheet or trying to put a square peg in a round hole with an application that’s not cutting it. You’ve stored notes everywhere and it’s impossible to keep track of all the information. On top of that, you have no control over the people who are submitting evidence.
Handpicked related content: How to End Compliance Chaos for Good in 2019
It’s not the people that make compliance so difficult—it’s your outdated tools. They make your processes more complicated than they need to be. And yet the only thing that holds these Stone Age methods together are the few brave souls using brute force to keep it going.
That’s why it sucks to be stuck in the Stone Age. But TCT is your portal out of the Stone Age and into the Digital Age.
Automated Accountability
TCT Portal is your self-serve, all-in-one compliance tracking software. The Portal harnesses the power of automation to reduce your compliance efforts by hundreds of man-hours each year. And one of its greatest benefits is taking manual accountability tasks off your plate.
When you leverage TCT Portal, you have a built-in workflow for the compliance engagement. Whether things shift sideways between team members, or up and down the workflow, it’s all tracked. You know what each person did, and when. You know where they submitted their files. Even if someone attaches files to the wrong spot, you can see what they did and find the missing file within a few seconds.
All of the reminders and the nagging comes out of TCT Portal. Not you. Instead of you manually figuring out who has what, and who did what but didn’t tell you, you can immediately see it in TCT Portal. No more hunting down each person to ask for an update. Everything is tracked, and all of that information is right at your fingertips.
[ROI calculator] How much time and money will TCT Portal save you?
Hands-free Compliance Maintenance All Year
The Portal’s automation becomes even more valuable once you move into ongoing compliance maintenance—which TCT calls Operational Mode. That’s when you’ve got those periodic requirements that need to be done all year long in order to maintain your certification. They’re due on a regular basis throughout the year, so you’re constantly doing compliance tasks.
If you’re stuck in the Stone Age, you’re on a hamster wheel that you can’t get off of—manually assigning responsibilities, trying to keep up with shifting assignments, constant cat herding. Now you’re not just nagging people during the annual compliance sprint, but throughout the whole year! Unless you use TCT Portal.
TCT Portal automatically prompts each person on a regular basis to keep everyone on your team on-track throughout the year. That way, they stay on track and you don’t have to micromanage anyone. Did assignments get shifted around? No problem! You don’t need to know who has what responsibilities, because the system is tracking it. You’re guaranteed that the assigned people will be prompted to do their tasks at the right time.
Even when you have employee turnover, you know everything that person did last time, before they left. You don’t have to guess what items they had, or what they supplied that passed muster with the assessor. You’ve got a record of it, and you can pull up that evidence for reference, if you need to.
Think about how much time that will save you every quarter. Not only can you stop doing onerous tasks you hate, but you’ve got more time to focus on the work you love.
Infographic: 5 Ways Compliance Software Makes Assessments Easy
Get Started with Compliance Automation Software
There’s a better way to manage compliance—and it doesn’t involve micromanaging your people. Automate compliance accountabilities and free up your time for work you enjoy. Why stay stuck in the Stone Age, with tools that only create more work and more stress?
Check out TCT Portal and see what compliance automation software can do for your company.
