Managing uncertainty: How organizations can move beyond simple compliance

This article is not meant to convince you of the merits of RFID-blocking wallets and underground bunkers. We see the security breach headlines, pray for litigation costs to reach a ceiling, and watch executives escorted from their headquarters for unethical conduct — but the exaggerations have become alarmist.

In practical terms, every organization deals with some level of uncertainty in regards to their information — the accuracy of quarterly projections, the introduction of previously unknown technologies, the impact of generational shifts in the workforce.

That said, what I concern myself with is how to leverage the knowledge from things we can and should measure all the time to proactively address blind spots.

We will discuss these potential uncertainties, how they can affect your organization, and the measures that you can take to address them before they become major issues.

Today, I will discuss the impact and importance of compliance to your organization.

This is where many organizations stop, however — a mistake in my view.

These organizations are missing out on the value of the learnings and metrics generated from their compliance activities, which can better inform decisions around information higher up the pyramid — inconclusive, intangible or even invisible. As an example of this, consider your accounts payable team.

Every business has bills and taxes to pay, and their own methods of doing so. Organizations that process hardcopy invoices find that this work takes longer, and that errors can create significantly larger bottlenecks than typically seen with electronic invoicing, which is more automated, accurate and more easily integrated with other systems in your organization.

Shifting to electronic invoicing also makes sense from a compliance perspective, and allows organizations to attain early payment discounts and more accurately report regulated financials. But where many organizations stop here, information leaders take steps to leverage additional value.

If the entire procurement-to-payment process can be conducted in near real-time, it frees up workers to spend less time matching vendor numbers and manually keying data from paper invoices, and more time looking for trends in purchasing habits, shipping times, vendor service level compliance and more. This information can then be used to inform decisions around information that was either previously inconclusive (lacking analytics), or intangible (e.g., what’s causing one branch to outperform another?). That’s why compliance addresses the foundation of the uncertainty pyramid — these issues are often at the heart of your business challenges.

Organizations need compliance to deal with much of their business information, but often fall short of making effective use of that information to respond to challenges that don’t easily present themselves on a balance sheet or operating report. And with the flood of information flowing into organizations only increasing, compliance should be seen as less of a requirement, and more for the extended value it can bring an organization.