Let’s face it. Your compliance management process is a freaking mess. Nothing is organized, you have no idea where half of last year’s compliance evidence is hiding, and there’s a good chance that you gave some original documents to your auditor. The long and the short of it is, you’re pretty much starting from Square One—again. And chances are, this year’s compliance management cycle won’t be any different from last year’s.
It’s pretty common for certification applicants to have all their evidence and documentation spread out all over the place—hard drives, Google Drive, intranet folders, email servers and handwritten notes. And it’s common for compliance administrators to have no idea where most of that evidence is located.
Which means you’re not in control of your compliance process.
Want to gain control? Create an organized single source of truth. A single source of truth is the one place where all of your compliance evidence and documentation resides. It’s organized, it’s dedicated solely to compliance evidence, the information exists on a system that your organization licenses AND it’s one-stop shopping for the source of truth—for where your compliance documentation lives.
Controlling your truth is possibly the single most powerful thing you can do to gain control of your compliance management. It produces tremendous benefits in several ways. Here are just a few of them.
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The Self-Assessment Annual Scramble
For many companies that do self assessments, it’s normally a mad scramble to cross their Ts and dot their Is at the end of the engagement. The compliance administrator mentally knows they have evidence for a certain item, somewhere. They’ve seen it before, but it’ll take forever to find it again. So they check the box to say it’s in place.
Then they move on, because they’re pressed for time and their boss is breathing down their neck to wrap everything up. Compliance is left in a disorganized mess at the end of the round, and it’ll still be a mess when the cycle starts up again next year.
If you’ve got a single source of truth, you can easily go back and review all of the evidence you supplied a year ago. The process for that second year of compliance is dramatically easier and faster, because everything is organized in the system, and you can easily reference each piece of evidence.
New Compliance Administrators
At some point you’ll have a new compliance administrator, and they won’t have a clue about last year’s compliance cycle. You can throw them in the deep end to flail around on their own, or you can set them up for success by providing a single source of truth that they can have at their fingertips.
A compliance management portal will help you organize everything, keep track of every piece of evidence and allow you to associate evidence. TCT Portal is already organized with justification and evidence at line-item level. The time it takes your new compliance administrator to figure out what you have and what you need need is dramatically shorter, because there’s a single source of truth that they can go to. Everything is lined up and organized by requirement.
More importantly—the evidence collected last year will be invaluable to the team members that have no clue what they supplied last year that met the requirement. Their time spent in subsequent years is dramatically streamlined, since they have the single point of truth with the exact policy, screenshot or configuration file that passed muster the year before.
Managing Multiple Requirements
If you’re tracking against multiple compliance requirements, your management insanity is exponentially more ridiculous. For example, let’s say you’re managing PCI and HIPAA. Not only do you need to track down more evidence, you’ll also need to figure out which HIPAA requirements map to which PCI requirements. It’s an enormous task—a project in itself.
But if you’re using TCT Portal as your single source of truth, all the mapping is automatically done for you. Simply take your most technical compliance requirement, fill that in and get it done, and click a button to map your inputs and responses between certifications. TCT Portal ties all of the associated evidence to the items in your other certifications. What’s left is just a handful of items that are unique to those other certifications themselves.
Juggling Multiple Auditors
If you’ve got multiple compliance standards, you probably have multiple auditors too. Many auditors have their own particular way they want you to submit items. Typically, that means you have to manually track down all of your documentation across your organization and send evidence to the auditor. Your source of truth is sprinkled across this auditor’s system and that auditor’s system. It’s a train wreck of having your stuff splayed everywhere.
But if you’re using TCT Portal, you can collect and organize all of your evidence, then package it up and send it to the auditor however they prefer to receive it. It lets you stay on track, keep organized, and preserve your OWN single source of truth. The best part: if you switch auditors or consolidate auditors, you’re still in control of your own point of truth.
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Take Control of Compliance Management
If last year’s pile of compliance evidence was barely held together during your last audit, it’ll be like starting from scratch during your next compliance scramble. Without a single source of truth—that you own and control—you’re just driving ongoing inefficiencies into the compliance management process, year after year.
Organizing all of your information from this year’s compliance cycle in one spot is pure money for next year’s compliance process. And with TCT Portal, you get automated mapping on top of it all.
Don’t start from Square One each year. Take control of your evidence with a single source of truth.
Ready to take control? Schedule your personalized demo today!
