Chief compliance officers have struggled at the bottom of the food chain for both budget and technology for years. While revenue generating departments have received the lion’s share of attention as it relates to technology, they have purchased solutions in silos, based on the needs of their individual departments. The result has been a data and process fabric that is challenging for the chief compliance officer to wrangle, audit and oversee.

The last decade has seen an increased role for compliance in technology purchases and mitigating risk through technology has become more common. While this has been an important evolution, the chief compliance officer still has to weed through an often confusing and decentralized array of data, systems and processes to create an integrated view of an organization’s risks.

The technology market is now at a place where it is beginning to bring compliance enabled technology solutions to market. Healthcare professional (HCP) engagement products now provide integrated workflows, strong process documentation and approval flows. These are key elements to defending a compliance program in the face of an audit. The power of these platforms is clearly illustrated in Deloitte’s survey which stated: “Our team recently conducted an industry survey where we asked organizations with partial to no automation if they were planning to implement an automated end-to-end HCP engagement process in the future. 53% of the companies we surveyed stated that they intended to automate within the next four years.”

While these HCP engagement solutions are a significant step forward in technology enabling a high-risk business process with compliance in mind, this is just the beginning. There are processes all around HCP engagement (e.g. event management, HCP portal, key opinion leader selection, etc.) that are still enabled through either manual service providers or unintegrated technology solutions.

The chief compliance officer today should be seeing increased integration of these processes and systems through API’s and ETL’s. This will allow the chief compliance officer to find and audit data for these processes in more consolidated instances than they have seen in the past.

In the next year or two, the chief compliance officer will start to see fuller, more integrated solutions that link together broader portions of the business into integrated platforms. This technology enablement will bring more of the business processes into compliance enabled workflows and will advance compliance’s ability to oversee and audit the business while also allowing compliance to take a less intrusive stance while doing so.

The future for the chief compliance officer will be in a world where

(a) the business is enabled with technologies that add efficiency to the business while providing appropriate compliance controls,

(b) business process and data are integrated, and

(c) compliance is enabled to partner with the business toward mutually held goals.


Craig Hauben
Chief Executive Officer

February 5, 2020