DCG solutions are designed to enforce corporate governance and regulatory compliance. But with the seemingly endless increase in communications tools, regulatory mandates and governance guidelines, many businesses are finding it challenging to implement a robust and future proof DCG strategy.
In this blog, we’ll help you understand why choosing the right DCG solution is essential, how to cut through the noise to find the right solution for your business and how we can help.
We’ll look at:
- the key challenges businesses are facing
- what to look for in a DCG solution
- how we can help.
The key challenges businesses are facing
While this is an expansive and complex area, according to the Gartner© Market Guide for Digital Communications Governance, 13 Nov 2023, which we’ll reference throughout this article, there are four key challenges that businesses are facing around the implementation and maintenance of digital communications governance.
1. The increasing range and complexity of digital communications tools
To be effective, DCG solutions need to support all communications tools used by an organisation’s employees – from traditional voice and email to mobile messaging apps (like Webex), virtual meeting solutions (like Microsoft Teams and Zoom) and beyond.
But as the range and complexity of communications tools continues to grow, so too does the challenge posed to businesses who must rely on their chosen DCG solution to provide policy management, enforcement and reporting, both for existing and new technologies.
2. The growing number of regulatory mandates and corporate guidelines
Gartner says, “enterprise organizations face a growing number of regulatory mandates (e.g., FINRA, FCA, HIPAA, GDPR) and corporate governance guidelines, such as proper employee conduct and handling of sensitive data, in the use of digital communications tools. To meet these requirements, they need to ensure that employee use of these tools aligns with their communication policies.”.
According to Gartner, “the DCG market is heavily influenced by regulatory requirements specific to communication tool use. Requirements may include establishing usage policies, capturing and retaining communications for a defined period, enabling search of communications content for audit, discovery or reporting purposes, and monitoring communications to assess employee adherence to defined policies.”.
These requirements, which are driven primarily by the financial services and public sectors, but affecting many other heavily regulated industries, are placing increasing pressure on those responsible for enforcing them within their organisations.
3. The increasing demand for mobile digital communications monitoring
The Gartner report states that “mobile communications and messaging applications are under heavy scrutiny by regulators and more broadly, by general corporate communication governance.”.
And that “this requirement is not only specific to messaging applications mentioned above, but includes mobile text messages, calls and recordings. This has led some enterprise organizations to reassess their corporate-owned-device or BYOD policy” leading to “increased demand for capture solutions to more proactively monitor their use.”.
4. The growing need to transition to AI- and ML-based surveillance
Gartner recommends that businesses “improve supervisory compliance efficiency and accuracy by selecting DCG solutions that provide Pa combination of lexicon and AI/ML enablement, which automate flagging, reduce false positives and provide the most accurate results for the compliance team.”.
Gartner also note that “DCG solutions are advancing the use of AI/ML and NLP in areas such as data classification and categorization, identification of sentiment and enhancement of proactive supervision/surveillance.”.
It’s therefore clear that DCG solutions must utilise the latest AI/ML and NLP developments and continually look to the future, where generative AI and LLMs will inevitably play a leading role in communications analysis and reporting.
What to look for in a DCG solution
Now that we understand the challenges, let’s look at the capabilities a DCG solution needs to address them.
According to the Gartner report, these are the must-have, standard and optional capabilities of a robust DCG solution.
“Must-have capabilities of a DCG solution include:
- Supporting primary communication sources including email and workstream collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack.
- Capturing, processing and storing employee communications within vendor-native or third-party archive solutions.
- Administering basic life cycle, export, reporting, search and access activities of supported communications.
Standard capabilities of a DCG solution include:
- Deployment options, including SaaS and PaaS.
- Supporting additional communications sources, such as text, chat and instant messaging (IM). These include SMS, MMS, meeting solutions and industry-specific tools (e.g., financial services).
- Classifying and categorizing captured content based on content metadata and aligning to appropriate data retention schedules.
- Organizing search activity into saved searches, assignment to investigations/cases, and data export management.
- Proactively monitoring communications against predefined lexicons.
Optional capabilities of a DCG solution include:
- Integration with mobile devices, including corporate-owned and bring-your-own devices (BYODs), to capture messaging applications, calls and voice recording content.
- Capturing messaging application sources.
- Capturing audio, video, call recordings and other screen-sharing content. This would also include services to transcribe to text.
- Capturing and rendering advanced characteristics of communications, such as reactions and emojis.
- Support for multiple languages.
- A complete reconciliation and auditing of captured communications, from source to storage.
- Classifying and categorizing captured content, based on the complete communication content and context, then aligning it to the appropriate data retention schedule.
- Automating proactive monitoring, alerting and tagging to create efficiencies and improve accuracy.
- Integration of data models, including large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing to expand proactive monitoring beyond lexicon-based rules.
- Assessing communications for sentiment, tone and other behavioral analytics, typically using AI/ML.
- Real-time interaction with communication tools to provide immediate feedback and remediation of employee actions.
- Implementation of techniques to reduce false positive and false negative outcomes, such as ML.
- Consolidating multiple communication sources into single-search, timeline and proactive-monitoring views.”
How we can help
We’re a world-leading provider of compliance solutions for financial services firms, trusted by 10 of the top 12 tier 1 global banks, more than a 180 other financial organisations and multiple businesses in other regulated sectors.
Our advanced analytics platform meets all of the criteria listed above and can help you develop and implement risk detection scenarios that align with your internal and regulatory requirements.
Using our DCG solution, you can easily:
| – Integrate over 200 data sources – Cleanse and enhance your data – Monitor risk and detect anomalies – Reduce costs of legacy data – Use full workflow audits for regulatory compliance – Feed data into analytic tools using open APIs | – Link structured / unstructured data – Generate AI-optimised models – Conduct behaviour analysis – Become vendor agnostic – Have an evidential weight vault of original raw data – Future proof your regulatory requirements |
Contact us today to find out more about our DCG solutions.
Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Communications Governance, By Michael Hoeck, 13 November 2023.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
