How Higher Education Institutions Can Streamline Compliance Management

Managing compliance within higher education isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s one of the most complex, complicated, and multifaceted contexts to practice compliance management.

For the poor soul who runs your institution’s compliance program, the job is stressful as hell. And it doesn’t let up, because there are typically multiple standards to meet, each with their own requirements and their own assessment cycles. 

It takes months of work just to prepare for compliance season. And when the gun goes off, it’s typically a rush to get everything ready for the Assessor, because you want to get your engagement responsibilities wrapped up before classes start in the fall. You’re constantly in a pressure cooker.

One of the big issues that institutions have to deal with is the fact that you have multiple vendors all under one organization. There’s the Registrar’s Office, the athletic department, dining services, the alumni association, bookstore and housing — just to name a scant few. Each department has its own set of functions, methods of payment, and sensitive data. And that means for these institutions, managing compliance sucks.

But TCT Portal is the compliance software that makes it suck a hell of a lot less. How much less? What kind of difference would it make to your institution if you could eliminate 65 percent of your pain and toil?

Why Compliance Management Is So Painful on Campus

It’s unbelievably stressful to manage compliance engagements at colleges and universities. My own introduction to compliance management involved a handful of vendors and fewer than ten people to provision evidence — a fairly simple, straightforward engagement, and it took me a full 18 months to figure out the first time. 

In contrast, with higher education everything gets multiplied by dozens or even hundreds of individual merchants, and hundreds of individuals to coordinate with. With that volume of people involved in the overall compliance engagement, you’re in a constant cycle of communication (and miscommunication), trying to get everyone on the same page, trying to get all of the assignments pushed out to the various individuals, and trying to keep track of every task across hundreds of merchants. 

To put it in context, if you have 20 pieces of evidence that you need to gather from 200 merchants on campus, that’s 40,000 different pieces of evidence that you now have to collect — all while controlling and monitoring the flow of data. 

Add to that the fact that each piece of evidence is moving through the workflow, which means you could be tracking its journey over perhaps six different stages. Do the math with 6 workflow steps and that’s 240,000 different potential states you need to monitor, for just 20 pieces of evidence. A typical compliance standard has hundreds of pieces of evidence to submit. Re-run your mental math to identify all of the possible states each piece of evidence could be in, and the numbers are simply staggering.

Colleges and universities have a significantly more complex scope of compliance requirements than most other organizations, which means they need compliance management solutions that can robustly and flexibly assist in bearing the weight. The intent is that the system eliminates those convoluted spreadsheets or the mishmash of internally built systems, network drops and internet based drop zones (such as SharePoint) you’re currently using. 

Managing Information Across Various Units

Because colleges and universities have so many vendors either taking payments or dealing with various forms of sensitive data, the flow of information is incredibly complex. Each institution is different. On many campuses, every merchant has their own merchant account and therefore must go through PCI compliance individually — although it’s still the responsibility of the institution to validate that all of the merchants are fulfilling their responsibilities. 

Better yet, certain pieces of information from the institution need to flow down to each of these merchants to lessen the burden on each of them.

In other cases, the flow of evidence submission goes up from the merchants to the college or university, where the evidence is consolidated. In yet other instances, compliance is broken into groups within the school. 

Whatever the case, it’s critical to ensure that the flow of information is handled appropriately and securely. 

The Advantage of TCT Portal for Higher Ed Institutions

The sheer coordination of responsibilities, communication, and evidence flow across dozens or hundreds of entities is an absolute nightmare. It’s nearly impossible to navigate those waters skillfully and successfully keep track of every moving part across the entire institution. The poor folks doing this deserve a medal! 

To be honest, it’s a responsibility that is unbelievably insurmountable if it is to be done successfully. At least, if you’re relying on manual tools or a plethora of internally developed systems and processes.

That’s where TCT Portal really shines.

TCT Portal is your all-in-one platform for organizing and managing all the moving parts of your complex compliance program. TCT Portal customizes the compliance tooling to your particular college or university. For one institution, all of the evidence needs to flow up to the centralized compliance entity. For another, each of the individual merchants on campus need to manage their own compliance engagements. Or it might be a hybrid model. 

Regardless of the circumstances of your institution, TCT Portal’s configuration can be elegantly customized to meet your institution’s existing processes and workflows. TCT prides itself on being a solution that customers can configure to their needs, instead of needing to alter their approach to suit the tooling.

TCT Portal Makes Compliance Easy for Everyone

In many cases, the people you’re depending on to submit evidence aren’t security experts. They’re general managers, or program directors, or key administrators. They aren’t compliance experts, and they don’t understand all the ins and outs of compliance management. That means your engagements flow as fast as molasses in winter.

Not only are these people learning on the job, they’re relearning their tasks every compliance cycle. It’s been almost a year since the last time they had to go through their activities, and it’s nearly impossible to remember how to gather up each specific element of evidence and submit it in a consistent manner across the engagement.

TCT Portal makes evidence submission incredibly easy and streamlined by leveraging a documentation request list. This list is customized for your specific institution, and it contains only the items that your merchants need to deal with. It’s a stripped down version of the compliance standard, written in plain English, using terms familiar to the participants and containing only the items that apply to them.

Must-have Features of Any Compliance Management Software

The document request list gives them simple instructions that are customized for the specific activities your people need to do. All they see is the list of evidence they themselves need to provide, with easy instructions that are tailored to their context at the organization. 

With our historical repository of previous years’ evidence, each participant can quickly look up what was submitted last year and do the same thing this time around. No worries that the Assessor will reject your submission, because it’s exactly what was accepted last year. All of that dreaded rework and endless rounds of rejected submissions fade away. 

Even better: new personnel can learn from previous submissions and have success right out of the gate.

And perhaps best of all: you don’t have scores of people coming to you and asking to be reminded what it is they need to provide. They can look it up themselves in seconds.

TCT Portal takes the guesswork out of compliance management. Every person knows exactly what to provide, where to get it from, what format to provide it in, and how to deliver it. It’s low stress, no confusion, and quick to do.

Stop Hunting Down Evidence

On top of that, TCT Portal automates the notifications to each individual for open items in their hands, so they always get prompted to do their tasks at the right time, every time. Reminders automatically go out for unfulfilled tasks, and the system keeps track of the status of every task for every person on every compliance framework in your organization.

The system only notifies those with new or outstanding tasks, and the notifications are customized to the tasks that need to be completed. That way, no one has an excuse that they didn’t know they had an assignment — everyone has complete clarity on their responsibilities.

Compliance Status in a Click

Need to know the status of your engagement? It’s literally impossible for most higher education institutions to get 100 percent clarity on their engagement status. By the time they’ve finally gathered all of the status information, multiple people have made changes and submitted more evidence that hasn’t been accounted for, yet. 

With TCT Portal, you can see the entire status of your engagement at a glance — in real time. Filter the information however you like to drill down on specific insights. In seconds, you know exactly what’s happening across your entire compliance engagement. 

One of the big problems on engagements as complex as your institution has to go through, is that when you schedule a compliance status meeting, for some inexplicable reason everyone tends to submit right before the meeting. This is no longer an issue when using a quality compliance management system since the information is live.

Our higher ed clients tell us that the capability to see live status is huge, because they no longer need to hunt down 200 people to find out what’s going on. They don’t have to manually check a dozen different input sources to try to piece together the current state of their engagement.

Reduce Compliance Management Pain by 65%

I mentioned earlier that TCT Portal could help you reduce your time and effort on compliance management by as much as 65 percent. That’s not an exaggeration. TCT Portal frees up valuable people resources to elevate their effectiveness, allows you to reallocate resources, and creates new options to utilize limited dollars.

If you’re looking for a compliance management system that streamlines your information flow across hundreds of merchants and units on campus, check out TCT Portal. We’ve priced it to make your purchasing decision a no-brainer, because we believe that security and compliance are too critical to willingly struggle with. 

Request your personalized demo today.