Regulatory Organization Evolution in a Digital Age
By Katherine Yang-Iott
Digitalization has been the major point of focus in much of our client work in the past 18 months, but what does Digitalization even mean? It’s not exactly just a shift away from paper-based manual processes and siloed systems, although that is part of the process. Instead, we view digitization as the natural progression of modernization. As your company evolves, much of the new tools and technologies promises to simply, organize, connect, and automate, well just about anything for everyone on your team.
Regulatory Operations have come a long way in the past 20 years. From the growing complexities involved with regulations and requirements to the evolving roles and skills necessary to handle and manage new responsibilities, our viewpoint of the past, present, and future of Regulatory organizations can be seen in the table below. Throw in the events of a pandemic year and a new virtual world order, however temporary, and you’ll get a pretty good glimpse of the most valuable attributes for the near future: Agility and Adaptability. Digitalization efforts at your company will drive the acceleration of agility and adaptability, so what are some critical considerations?
From an organizational standpoint, it’s vital to understand how digitalization enables connectivity while being able to distinguish the difference between technical connectivity and true integration of end-to-end processes that requires cooperation between tools, people, and other organizational forces. Foundational elements, such as establishing governance, workforce and talent development, and user engagement, need to be explored and strengthened to achieve the desired outcomes of new capabilities, higher quality, and improved efficiencies. These things don’t just happen in a vacuum and certainly can’t be achieved singularly with just a tool or type of technology. Digitalization will also change the dynamics of your regulatory ecosystem by introducing automation and digitalization factors reshaping your workforce. How are you going to use the new resources that digitalization gives you access to: new data, real time information, cross-functional knowledge sharing, different perspectives? One common pitfall of being able to generate more and more data is now you have more information than ever before but, what are the critical insights? Some might get lost in a growing ‘sea of data’ and perhaps, unintentionally resulting in being more poorly informed than ever before. Roles and responsibilities will evolve and emerge from your company’s digitalization journey. Skills and talent that were not necessarily heavily invested in in the past, such as data scientists or team development leads, will become a major part of how work gets done in the future. Even the way you measure and view success and KPIs will shift as your organization gets better at becoming more preventative and predictive with the use of AI and machine learning. At the end of the day, your company needs to gather the right talent and align them with optimal organizational strategies to evolve and improve.
Recently, I was watching the 2021 Tokyo Olympics and one of the coaches commented on the importance of progress over performance for athletes. I interpreted his observations as this: the viewers and judges focus solely on the performance, who comes out on top at a given point in time. After all, high performers are awarded medals for their execution. Still, I observed ranking world champions fail to place due to injuries, miscommunications, very minor missteps, or simply just not being in the right mindset. This certainly doesn’t take away from all the accomplishments achieved throughout the athletes’ career but the outcome is still a disappointment for everyone because we invest so much in singular moments.
