Compliance Week subscribers, we need your help! The magazine has not one, but two upcoming items of business that need input from compliance experts, and that means you.

First is our Compliance Week 2012 annual conference, which will happen June 4-6 next year in Washington, D.C. Behind the scenes we've been busy assembling a superb board of advisors, and they will be announced soon. That board helps me and Compliance Week staffers shape the agenda of the conference, focusing ideas and finding appropriate speakers. But we still want as many ideas as possible; they are the raw material that makes our conference the premier event in the compliance and audit field. So next is our general call for ideas—and that's where we need your help. Quite simply, what would you like to see on our agenda?

I'm always eager to hear any idea at all from our subscribers, so feel free to suggest whatever comes to mind. But broadly speaking, we want ideas in three broad categories:

  • Content. The Compliance Week conference is open to anyone in the compliance, risk, audit and governance professions. That's a lot of people, and consequently we address a lot of subjects. Should we focus on new rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission? New financial reporting standards from the Financial Accounting Standards Board? Strategies to negotiate with the Justice Department during a bribery probe? Efforts to improve the IT security around your customer data? Those are all fine ideas for content, but they barely scratch the surface. What else would you like to learn about?
  • Format. Hey, we're fans of the three-person panel discussion at industry conferences as much as anyone else, but mixing things up doesn't hurt either. This year, for example, we staged a mock privacy breach and let the audience work its way through a proper response. Starting in 2009 we added our small-room, off-the-record “Conversation” sessions, and they've been wildly popular as well. How else might we jazz up the presentation of information? What's the best way we can impart our material to you?
  • Sophistication. We've been hosting the Compliance Week conference since 2006, and in that time I've noticed a split emerging in our audience: veterans who know the mechanics of running a compliance function well, and novices recently assigned to the compliance department who want a grounding in the basics. We welcome both, of course, but how should we structure our material to deliver the most useful content to both audiences?

The good news is that Compliance Week does not have any formal process for submitting ideas. Just email me directly at mkelly@complianceweek.com, and I'll respond within 24 hours to get that conversation started. This conference exists to serve you, so speak up as often as you'd like.

Our second item of business is for all you compliance officers in the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector: We're conducting a survey on current practices in the field, and would like your input.

The survey itself can be found here—a free, anonymous, two-page poll that asks questions about how you structure your compliance and risk management functions, and what your primary worries are. We'll use the responses to compile a special report later this fall about compliance in the life sciences sector, including an invitation-only online conference to discuss the results.

Benchmarking data is one of the most common requests we hear from subscribers, and this survey is an effort to fill that need. So the more responses we get, the better product we'll deliver next month. Thanks, and we appreciate the help!