Compliance & Governance

Compliance and governance are two important functions of any document management system.  The ability to control and audit all documentation created within an organization from its creation to its destruction is key, especially in highly regulated industries like financial services and healthcare.   Document Management Systems provide a means to govern the flow and use of documents, from capture to elimination.  Many of the regulations focused in this area were created due to the illegal destruction of documents in many recent legal cases.

Here are the Wikipedia definitions:

Governance describes the overall management approach through which senior executives direct and control the entire organization, using a combination of management information and hierarchical management control structures. Governance activities ensure that critical management information reaching the executive team is sufficiently complete, accurate and timely to enable appropriate management decision making, and provide the control mechanisms to ensure that strategies, directions and instructions from management are carried out systematically and effectively.

Compliance means conforming with stated requirements. At an organizational level, it is achieved through management processes which identify the applicable requirements (defined for example in laws, regulations, contracts, strategies and policies), assess the state of compliance, assess the risks and potential costs of non-compliance against the projected expenses to achieve compliance, and hence prioritize, fund and initiate any corrective actions deemed necessary.

Using document management, workflow/BPM and document capture solutions can help with these two core focus areas.