Compliance with GDPR is a process, not a checklist

The European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), will be going into effect this week (May 25).

Coordinating everyone and everything involved in GDPR compliance is a big job. When we look at GDPR from a process standpoint, what we see is that properly automating business processes is key to making GDPR work in the enterprise.

Action on GDPR will reach wide and far in an organization, with multiple responsible people and numerous processes involved, even if your organization doesn’t directly do business with EU-based customers or partners. In today’s global economy, it’s actually pretty unlikely that a non-EU company or organization interacts with exactly zero EU-based individuals, and that’s all it takes for them to fall under the GDPR requirements.

All internal processes around data need to be inspected: financial data, marketing, sales, customer support, customer success. What are the internal rules governing data management for these systems? Are there rules for when and how data is to be deleted, or whether it can expire?

Beyond auditing and documenting the location of all the internal data that might be affected by GDPR, have you actually begun implementing processes governing how all your systems manage specific data access, movement, and persistence? Have you put into action the appropriate workflows to respond completely to the right to be forgotten and other aspects of GDPR? This point of action is where a business process management (BPM) platform can be of enormous help.

The application of BPM can streamline complex GDPR processes with automation. BPM processes can govern how all your systems manage specific data access, movement, and persistence, and at the same time document and provide traceability for appropriate data management.

Compliance with GDPR itself is a process, not a checklist or a series of random steps. A BPM-based GDPR process can be specifically designed to manage personal data across the organization.

Check out this video to see a demonstration of how the Bonita BPM platform can save compliance time and put a sustainable solution in place for all processes related to GDPR, however complex the information system.

(In French, too!)