Data visability key to compliance

The number one complaint among compliance officers, according to a Compliance Week columnist is that, "compliance departments cannot achieve the visibility into corporate operations that they need if they're to do their jobs effectively. Once upon a time, when we were still mired in a more paper-centric world, the complaint was that other business departments never took compliance seriously. Now (mostly) everyone does, but in the data-centric world, nobody really knows the full scope of what's going on at the business anyway."

It's fair to say that few companies have the systems that can offer enough visibility into all relevant data to allow compliance executives to feel like they have a handle on things. I couldn't agree more, and I've discussed variations on this theme for quite some time.

In one deep dive, for example, I took a look at Dodd-Frank, which represents a host of new rules and regulations, many of which will require reporting on a whole new scale for lots of companies, not just banks. The new data imperative will take two forms: Data visibility for internal compliance and data visibility for reporting purposes.

As the industry heads into 2013, the imperative will not abate. Your job depends on access to relevant data quickly and intelligently. Most have their work cut out for them, and it's fair to say that the stakes are higher than ever.

For more:
- here's the column