A compliance management dashboard is a tool that offers organizations an overview of their organizational and regulatory compliance issues and initiatives in a display format for ease of use by compliance managers.
Compliance management covers internal policies and procedures, as well as federal and state regulatory requirements including the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Enforcing compliance helps an organization detect if it’s violating any rules, protecting it from massive fines and/or lawsuits.
Compliance management, also called compliance risk management, refers to managing and complying with the laws, standards, policies, and codes of conduct that apply to a company.
As organizations respond to regulatory standards, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), they need easier, more efficient technologies to better track and manage the compliance process and changing compliance requirements.
One such technology is the compliance dashboard. A compliance dashboard is a software that gives a company a total overview of its compliance initiatives in an interactive display that’s easy to use.
What Do Compliance Management Dashboards Do?
Compliance dashboards, often found in compliance management solutions, help with decision making by bringing different data sources together to describe a compliance program, or identify a potential problem with overall compliance. Organizations can use compliance dashboards to gather and interpret data, flag anything out of the ordinary, and react to areas of non-compliance.
Compliance management dashboards must offer real-time compliance monitoring so a company doesn’t become non-compliant over time. The longer the time between the monitoring, the more likely the compliance violations will occur and not be detected.
In a large enterprise, a compliance management department sets internal policies that keep the organization in line with the rules and guidelines set by outside regulations, laws, or industry standards.
The job of a corporate compliance officer is to see that the policies, procedures, monitoring, and reporting meet the business needs for compliance. Because compliance officers work across departments, they must be good communicators.
A compliance officer who is developing a new compliance management dashboard has to make a number of decisions, including:
- Which metrics they should include on the compliance management dashboard;
- How to group the metrics on the compliance management dashboard;
- How frequently to update the compliance management dashboard;
- Whether it’s better to create more than one compliance management dashboard, each centered on a more specific purpose.
All compliance management dashboards differ according to the needs and demands of each company and its industry. Therefore, when a company selects a compliance management dashboard, it should look for one that is flexible and can be customized.
One way a compliance officer uses a compliance management dashboard is to explain the state of compliance throughout the business to board members and other company decision-makers. A compliance management dashboard provides real-time information to help business leaders identify trends throughout the company and spot compliance problems before they become threats.
In addition, companies can use compliance management dashboards to develop metrics to determine how effective their compliance programs are, as well as to monitor and react to production events in real-time.
That’s because compliance management dashboards often connect directly to information sources, rather than offline data warehouses, so users can react to issues from the screens of their compliance management dashboards in real-time. For example, users could stop production or send out alerts based on the data from the compliance management dashboard.
Compliance Management vs. Risk Management
Compliance management ensures that your organization is in compliance with relevant frameworks, industry standards, and regulations.
Risk management begins with a risk assessment exploring your organization’s weaknesses or vulnerabilities to threats and ranking them according to the likelihood of occurrence and severity of impact.
You can manage risks without managing compliance, but you can’t manage compliance without knowing your risks and what’s required under different frameworks to address or mitigate them.
If You Need Help
Using a quality governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software can help you not only manage your organizational risks but also comply with applicable regulations and standards all at once.
ZenGRC’s user-friendly, color-coded dashboards show in a glance where you comply and where you have gaps, and how to fill those gaps. ZenGRC also helps with vendor management by monitoring your third-party contractors for compliance, updates compliance regulations and requirements as they change, conducts internal audits as often as you’d like, and much more.
Worry-free compliance is the Zen way. Contact us today for your free consultation.