The Compliance Revolution: How Compliance Needs to Change to Survive

Part ThreePurpose

Compliance and regulation is a hope for something better—it has purpose. Compliance may not be delivering quite yet, but by understanding the underlying processes we can steer compliance in a positive direction.

In this part we consider:

1. Community—overall purpose
2. Corporate faith—how purpose is translated into business drivers
3. Corporate maturity—developing maturity and the processes of change

How compliance understands purpose will determine compliance's performance in the foreseeable future and its survival as a profession.

Although ethics, culture, governance, outcome, and community have emerged as logical additions to the regulation and compliance toolkit, they need to be understood as operating together to:

1. Create an infrastructure that allows stages 4 and 5 to be sufficiently embedded.
2. Provide an extended toolkit to allow new challenges to be faced.
3. Explain the core processes that drive compliance performance.
4. Offer a framework for improving performance.
5. Improve the credibility and standing of compliance.
6. Offer a sense of overall purpose.
7. Ensure that compliance will become a profession.

Recently, there has been a tendency to see compliance under the umbrella term governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). This correctly recognizes the need for a joined-up approach but fails to identify the processes and structures that operationalize and justify this connection. Part III aims to provide that framework.