Compliance and ethics is not the same today as it was a few years ago. The forces shaping compliance are likely to continue to influence the trajectory of compliance and ethics for years to come. In the past, compliance was distributed and disconnected. The relationship of ethics to compliance was inconsistent. Organizations may have had a centralized compliance function to manage critical compliance issues bearing down on the business, but compliance in reality was fragmented and distributed with highly redundant approaches taxing the business. This resulted in a maze of processes, reporting, and information. Each department relied on document-centric and manual approaches that did not integrate, and compliance professionals spent more time managing the volume of documents than it did actually managing compliance. There were inconsistent formats for policies and procedures, issue/incident reporting, and assessments.
