Getting buy-in from key stakeholders in your organization is a critical part of a successful software purchase and implementation process. With budgets tight and resources limited, how do you make the case for your organization to invest in compliance technology?
It all starts with telling the right story within your firm.
In the webinar Building a Business Case to Support Process Improvements and Compliance Technology Change Mitch Avnet from Compliance Risk Concepts and I sat down to have a conversation about navigating software change within organizations.
According to Mitch, the first step in building a business case to support the purchase of updated compliance technology is identifying and reaching out to your stakeholders. Mitch says “I always recommend starting with understanding who your key partners are and who you need to secure buy in from—and making sure these individuals have a seat at the table right from the very beginning of the process. Unless your plan is socialized appropriately across, up, down, left to right throughout the organization, you're going to start at a distinct disadvantage.”
Time and money are at the forefront of every executive’s mind. To build a business case, you need to lay out a narrative that really spells out the need for new compliance technology with a focus on cost and efficiency. As we discussed in the webinar, you have to take look at your ability to provide good, timely risk analysis to your organization, and if procuring technology will enable you to work faster, better and smarter. That's something that you really need to vet and drive home as you’re developing your story.
The more data behind your business case the better. How are you going to save money for the organization by implementing this technology? Specific and tangible examples that show how the organization is really going to benefit will help lead to that “lightbulb moment” for senior management and other stakeholders. Read more about how an integrated approach to technology saves organizations time and money.
Telling the right story is important throughout the entire process – not just upfront. Buy-in is also critical for a successful implementation. When you implement new technology you’re going to have new processes, and people can be hesitant to change. If you get stakeholders ranging from end users to senior management committed you’ll have champions and evangelists of the software already in place and it’s going to make implementation easier.
A question we often receive here at MCO is what if people won’t listen to my story? Mitch says the message for stakeholders should be “look at what’s going on in the industry and ask yourself- can this happen here? That point can be really illuminating for the senior people in the organization, so you continue to get their attention and continue to provide that impactful guidance that really forces them to see that if it happened to ABC, why can't it happen to us? We have the same exposure. We haven't done anything about it. How do we address this? So when the regulators do their sweep or they come in here, we've got the right answer.
The approach used to be we'll pay the traffic tickets, but that can't be the approach anymore. With the cost of doing business in today's day and age and, and the severity of fines and sanctions, that traffic ticket can put you out of business. And the smaller you are as an organization, the more scary those types of scenarios really become.”
Hear from industry experts about regulatory expectations for the second half of 2020.
MyComplianceOffice provides a fully integrated, Conduct Risk platform that helps organizations avoid fines and sanctions by using a global company and security master dataset to identify conflicts across employees, firm transactions and third parties.
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