Beyond the Binder: Policy governance in practice

Most compliance professionals have faced it: a regulator or client requests a policy, and multiple versions emerge, each slightly different, all marked “final.” The problem is rarely a lack of effort. More often, documents have been developed reactively, in silos, or without a unifying governance framework.

This is understandable. Smaller companies may lack resources to formalize documentation, while global enterprises wrestle with legacy practices, regional variations, and overlapping templates. Add the pace of regulatory change, and the result is predictable — documents that confuse rather than clarify, and frameworks that don’t fully support employees or satisfy stakeholders.