What Problem Does NAPE Solve For?
NAPE allows you to empirically prove that, "you are doing the things that you have stated you are supposed to do," such that the assurance process of verifying that you are "doing what you said you would do" can be automated by computers.
The Only Constant is Change
Keeping up with all the rules and regulations is one of the biggest challenges in regulated business. Relying on old methods—like using lots of paperwork and manual labor—is no longer enough as these requirements grow. These traditional methods don’t work well for large-scale operations, are not efficient, and do not help in capturing important information over time.
Many companies and organizations adopt technology in two ways to address such issues, although they continue to run into limitations due to the scale of the job functions and tasks this regulatory and compliance work creates.
The First Adoption Issue - Misaligned Technology
There is a mismatch between what humans and machines are good at is a reason for this problem. Companies do not use enough of the correct technology to handle simple, repetitive tasks that computers can easily do. Instead, companies do one or both of two things.
They only adopt technology that removes the handwritten paper and replaces these handwritten documents with digitized documents.
Companies hire more people to execute simple evaluation tasks for which computers are best suited.
This approach wastes resources and becomes even more problematic when employees leave, taking important knowledge with them.
The Second Adoption Issue - Misaligned Labor
There is a gap between the technical work needed to assure compliance and the knowledge of the people doing the work. Often, people who don’t fully understand the compliance or regulations requirements create solutions that don’t solve the problems. On the other hand, experts who know the rules well cannot handle the technical side, which means they cannot work autonomously on these tasks.
Re-Thinking Assurance and Technology Adoption
These two adoption issues demonstrate companies must rethink how they organize their work between the technical talent and their employees who best understand the compliance and regulatory requirements.
All organizations should be to let computers handle the tasks they do best, such as processing and storing information. Applying this level of automation allows humans to focus on making strategic decisions and assessing risks. This change will create an organizational behaviour of ongoing, real-time compliance checks so companies are always ready for an audit and can achieve this state with 0 marginal costs.
With such an approach, human efforts can focus on finding new risks and managing them before they become problems rather than just fixing issues after they arise.