Throwing out the “manual”: How smart companies are conducting their investigations
February 25, 2019
February 25, 2019
With the Hayne Commission on everyone’s minds, it’s never been more important for companies to be able to conduct credible, independent investigations. And it’s not just financial services institutions under the microscope. With the steady increase of financial, ethical and environmental regulation and enforcement across all industries, more and more companies are under intense scrutiny.
To properly fulfil governance duties, boards and executives often need investigations to assess customer complaints, or instances where Internal Audit identifies misconduct or Risk finds compliance breaches. Often, these investigations are highly complex – for example, in response to a patient complaint in a hospital – requiring a thorough, auditable, compliant and transparent process. Worse, each investigation has unique characteristics, making it hard to drive efficiencies when conducting investigations at scale.
Investigations are a massive drain on resources
They are expensive, complex, time-consuming and disruptive to business operations and personnel. Investigations often have to be completed within mandated timeframes or against the clock of customer and media expectations. But, at the same time, given the fines that could be levied or the potential damage to brand and reputation, you can’t cut corners. Your investigation must be able to produce a coherent, robust, brief of the evidence needed to defend against or prosecute a (possibly criminal) case.
Frequently conducted using emails and excel spreadsheets, the manpower requirements for investigations can be crippling. Very few organisations have dedicated investigations teams. People either get pulled out of other bits of the business – leaving gaps – or organisations rely on multiple third parties. Neither option is ideal. How do you orchestrate all the tasks by third parties and track that each required activity has been done – and done correctly?
Why aren’t we automating these processes?
You’d think investigations would be first on the list for automation, but this has proved extremely challenging. Part of the problem is that investigations – by nature – need information from multiple systems that don’t talk to each other and may be owned by other companies. So, you need to patch together different bits of technology.
This is perfectly possible but, given each investigation is unique, requiring information from different systems and people, it’s not worth doing for a single investigation. As a result, even digitally sophisticated organisations are continuing to conduct investigations manually, chewing through horrendous amounts of human and monetary resources.
Emerging technologies will be a life saver
New developments in intelligent automation, AI and human-centred design are being used to create investigation case management platforms that remove human steps and physical handoffs and learn from each case. These platforms integrate easily with any internal or external system and can be easily customised by people in the business for the next investigation. They enable:
The platforms can also track people, objects, locations and events and correlate them with other data points in an investigation. For example, they can quickly and easily identify every data point in the investigation that touches a person of interest, or a particular instance of river pollution. This means, if you have 12 separate reports about the same environmental incident, the system correlates them and treats them as one.
This is all good news for companies struggling to resource multiple investigations. Investigation case management platforms mean that boards will be able to commission investigations, knowing the results will be credible, the process will be transparent and the cost will be manageable. In the current environment of intense scrutiny, there’s never been a better time to throw the “manual”.