Crossing the ethical chasm of data – A compliance perspective

Raimund Laqua (ray.laqua@leancompliance.ca) is Founder and Chief Compliance Engineer of Lean Compliance Consulting, Inc. in Ontario, Canada.

Compliance, in many ways, is about doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. Collecting evidentiary material is an important aspect in providing assurance, and for many companies, it is a way to improve compliance.

This evidence often comes in the form of data and plenty of it. Companies measure, gather, and store data of all kinds and in increasing amounts. In fact, as companies continue their digital progression, the amount of data is expected to balloon.

All this data will be analyzed, and patterns will be discovered. This will help in updating our system models and processes to make them more efficient. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning will take this to even higher levels and discover patterns that we currently cannot see, and all of this can be used for improvement.

However, even with these advancements, what this data will never be able to tell us is how things “ought” to be. In other words, data cannot be used to determine what is right.

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