Compliance Unfiltered is TCT’s tell-it-like-it is podcast, dedicated to making compliance suck less. It’s a fresh, raw, uncut alternative for anyone who needs honest, reliable, compliance expertise with a sprinkling of personality.
Show Notes: Introducing EZ Cert!
Quick Take
On this week’s episode of Compliance Unfiltered, The CU Guys discuss the launch of EZ Cert, a new feature in the TCT Portal, designed to simplify compliance tasks for end users.
Adam explains how EZ Cert streamlines the interface, making it more accessible and efficient for users who only occasionally interact with the system. The conversation highlights the business value of EZ Cert, emphasizing its ability to reduce bottlenecks and improve the efficiency of compliance engagements.
The episode also touches on the benefits of EZ Cert for assessors.
All this and more on this week’s Compliance Unfiltered.
Read The Transcript
So let’s face it, managing compliance sucks. It’s complicated. It’s so hard to keep organized and it requires a ton of expertise in order to survive the entire process. Welcome to Compliance Unfiltered, a podcast dedicated to making compliance suck less. Now here’s your host, Todd Coshow with Adam Goslin.
Well, welcome in to another edition of compliance unfiltered I’m Todd Coshow alongside the pumpkin spice latte to your compliance autumn, Mr. Adam Goslin. How the heck are you, sir?
I’m doing good. We’re almost we’re almost there. It’s uh, it’s about that time. I got leaves. I got leaves starting to drop over here.
Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Well, anytime you start to see the Han Solo outfit coming out on the ladies, like, you know that pumpkin slice off sleeves are right around the corner. We are there. And speaking of highly anticipated releases, today is a very special edition of Compliance Unfiltered. We’ve got some exciting news. So TCT has just released EZ Cert capabilities. And I’m told the listeners at a high level about why we release the new functionality.
Well, you know, we, the existing TCT interface, and this is actually, this has been on the request list for folks for a week or three. We’ve wanted to do it for some period of time, but we’ve been getting a number of requests. The reality is, is that when we initially built the portal, I mean, I’ve made no bones about it over the last decade plus, that it’s been up running live and serving compliance folks, that my primary intention was to design, build something that worked. Not necessarily looked pretty, but did a kick-ass job. And so, you know, the reality is, is that it provided, continues to provide a tremendous amount of power for compliance teams. It didn’t matter whether it was organizations that were subject to compliance, whether they were assessment firms or, you know, kind of acting in that compliance consultant arena. You know, historically, the vast majority of the main users of the portal were, you know, highly technical folks and used to dealing with the massive complexities of compliance management, basically, gear heads. And, you know, there’s always been this set of users that do need to provision evidence that are non-technical. You know, they need to be able to submit evidence, but, you know, they’re not familiar with the realm of compliance or aren’t as comfortable with the, you know, with the power that comes with the TCT portal. And, you know, they’re only occasionally using it. And the, you know, the full featured, you know, compliance management system interface can, it gives them a, you know, gives them a sense of it being cumbersome or time-consuming or stressful experience, that type of thing. And, you know, we didn’t want people, you know, having to kind of retrain themselves, you know, on the, you know, on the capabilities every time that they had to come in and come in and do something. So, you know, we’ve had this enhancement, you know, on the books for a long time and, you know, just released, you know, EZ Cert for TCT portal so that, you know, really to help out the technical, the non-technical users be able to do their activities in kind of a more simplified streamline, you know, interface that’s easy to use, that they can instantly pick up, you know, hit the ground running and then, you know, and then be able to go. So that makes sense. That was it at a high level.
Sure. Well, tell us more about EZ Cert.
Well, the interface itself, it provides kind of a modernized streamlined interface. It’s basically designed specifically for those non-technical folks that don’t have to use the portal kind of day in and day out. They’re not using it. We’ve got a lot of capabilities within the system, right? We’ve got organizations, TCT included, that will leverage the system in what we call an operational mode. So they’re literally, we’re in it. I bet we wrote it, but there’s organizations out there that use the system in this operational mode where they’re provisioning their evidence all year long and regularly getting into looking at and interacting with the system. But EZ Cert effectively, it only presents the views and tools that these folks need to provision their evidence. It doesn’t have all of the additional and sundry capabilities, power, flexibility, ways to slice and dice the information and data. So we basically have limited down the view for those users. It’s kind of an attractive view, number one, number two. It only has those things that they need. We wanted to make something that would reduce friction, eliminate confusion, and just cut through that complexity for the business owners, the control owners, or personnel that are supplying, supporting evidence for a compliance engagement. So the interface just literally will display to the user kind of a clear intuitive path to getting their stuff done. There’s no clutter, there’s no extra navigation, no risk of getting lost in the broad capabilities of the system itself so that they can go in and just confidently, quickly engage in their compliance activities, get in, supply their stuff, et cetera. So when the interface presents, it’s basically got, I almost call it like blinder mode, if you will, you know, the user will log in. They’ll see a list of their stuff, not everybody’s stuff, but just their stuff, and they can click into one of them. It’ll provision them, you know, kind of the guidance that they, not the guidance, but it’ll provision the requirements for that particular control. They’ll have a place to put in explanations and detach their evidence, mash the complete button. You’re moving on to the next one. Their dashboard really is centered on just their thing. So it says you’re, you know, 33% of the way there with your items. You’ve finished, I got, now I got to do the rough math. You’ve finished three of your nine items, you know, type of a thing. So you got to make it work. So it just simplifies the hell out of the interface, type of a deal. And that was kind of, that was our goal or our objective, was to make their lives easier.
What is the business value of EZ Cert?
Well, you know, it does create some additional value for, you know, not only for the non-technical personnel who have kind of geared the interface to, but even for the technical personnel because, you know, the tool makes it possible for all of the provisioners of the evidence to go in, do their job quicker, faster, easier, without needing to ask for help. You know, one of the things that we’ve done in the interface is, you know, not kind of presented right up front, but, you know, we do have a section for guidance that the, you know, that the users can go in and leverage and access, which would allow them to see not only the industry, excuse me, not only the industry standard guidance, but if the organization that’s subject to compliance is working with an assessment firm or, you know, consulting house, et cetera, then they can additionally see all of their customized guidance as well. But it’s like literally a click of the button slides out, you know, for them, they can reference that, et cetera, go back to, you know, provisioning and whatnot. But, you know, what it means is that, you know, the business value comes in where the compliance managers and the assessors, they’re getting what they need.They’re getting it faster. There’s less delays. There’s less bottlenecks. You’re not having, I’ve talked about this before, you know, one of the big problems historically on these engagements is that the evidence provisioners, the minute that they run into, you know, into an issue, will simply wait until their next, you know, until their next compliance meeting. Well, it might be five days from now, type of a thing. So now you’re losing this calendar time. The more that we can, you know, kind of arm the organization to just do the better off overall it’s going to be because the organization is ultimately spending less time, you know, on their compliance engagement. So, you know, the bigger the organization, the greater the value they’re going to get, you know, out of the use of the easy cert because, you know, we can enable this. So imagine I’ve got a team of people. Let’s pretend I have 20 evidence provisioners on my engagement. And let’s say that 16 of those are, you know, more technical, you know, style resources, but four are not. And so down to the user level, we can go ahead and turn on the capability for the use of EZ Cert for those four. There may even be a couple of gear heads that are like, hey, I don’t need all these features and functions. I just want to go in and get my stuff done. Great. You can turn on for them too. But, you know, all the way down to user by user, track by track, I can go down and turn on EZ Cert for whomever the next moment they log in or the next moment that they refresh their interface. They’re seeing the same information just presented in a, you know, kind of in a, you know, nice, crisp, clear fashion. So, you know, we’ve got, you know, we’ve got organizations that are leveraging the portal that quite literally it’s corporate and hundreds of locations.
So I don’t know, imagine like a retail or petroleum style, you know, organization that’s got, you know, hundreds of outposts where they have to gather and provision evidence from, you know, effectively completely non-technical users. This is where EZ Cert really going to, you know, step in, be able to help those organizations out, you know, enable throughput on the engagement better than they, you know, than they were before. So that means everybody on the team, they can have a view of the data and the information on the compliance engagement that works for them. So the technical folks can still keep all of their full featured capabilities within the portal, you know, but then provision it out to the, you know, to the folks that are the non-technical do that in, you know, in kind of a streamlined fashion. So, you know, the cool part is, is everybody, nobody wants to get into this world of compliance and struggle, you know, they want to be able to walk in, be confident, get their stuff done, you know, and, you know, kind of do their part, keep it moving. So this is really just, you know, a tool that another tool to go throw into the arsenal for, you know, for organizations to be able to help them navigate the, you know, the waters of their compliance engagements more easily.
Hmm, on the flip side of that, like how does EZ Cert help assessors?
Well, the assessors are also seeing benefits because, you know, on most of their engagements, they do have technical, non-technical folks that they’re trying to coordinate and do the evidence gathering with. And so, you know, a lot of the assessment firm, you know, customers are excited about being able to provide, you know, EZ Cert to client personnel that would benefit from that, you know, simple streamlined interface. You know, we’ve, like I said, we’ve had this on the list for a while. We initially, we released this right before we went to PCI, North American Community Meeting. And it was really, really cool having, you know, having, you know, both existing and new organizations coming up, being able to see the, you know, it’s going to bring to their engagement. So, you know, EZ Cert certainly relieves the tension of getting the non-technical folks up to speed on, you know, on using, you know, a powerful tool like the TCT portal. And, you know, but the assessors get, they can keep their detailed view and full features. Meanwhile, the clients are leveraging the simplicity of easy cert, you know, where you’ve got this mix of different folks on the team. You know, now we can, you know, we can go ahead and provision the right interfaces to the right people, streamline, onboarding, training, you know, adoption, things along those lines. And at the end of the day, you know, the result for the assessors is that they’re going to see, you know, a more efficient engagement, more client-friendly workflow, you know, that’s benefit everybody as they’re kind of going through that process. You know, it’s, you know, it really also works to enhance the, you know, the look and feel of the interface for the end customers as well, you know, giving the assessors that leverage TCT portal for all their engagements, you know, gives them a competitive differentiator to, you know, show a modernized, you know, modernized interface that’s simple to use, you know, for their client base. It is, it’s going to be providing them, you know, with a myriad of benefits as well.
parting shots and thoughts for the folks this week, Adam.
Well, you know, we’ve done a lot of chit-chat about the EZ Cert arena, you know, certainly getting this in place is it’s going to be helping folks subject to compliance. It’s going to be helping folks on the assessor side, helping consulting houses be able to navigate the waters better, give their users options, you know, for interfaces and whatnot. You know, one of the things that we are in the process of doing is also extending the look and feel enhancements that we started with on EZ Cert and really extending that out to the whole platform. So we’ll have more, we will have more coming, but I was just really glad to be able to you know, us get this interface concluded, you know, and whatnot. The response from both the existing and new folks that we talked to in North America was across the board, astoundingly positive. And then as we look toward, we’re going to be heading over to Europe, you know, here in October. I’m real excited to show both our existing and new clients the capabilities there as well. I think it’s going to make a big difference in terms of the, you know, the rollout of the platform and certainly our customers and our customers’ clients’ interaction, a heck of a lot, you know, easier to be able to navigate with the right interface for the right people on the team. I think it’s going to make a big difference.
I agree. And that right there, that’s the good stuff. Well, that’s all the time we have for this episode of Compliance Unfiltered. I’m Todd Coshow and I’m Adam Goslin, hope we helped to get you fired up to make your compliance suck less.
