As we all know on August 8, 2005, President Bush signed into law the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which authorized the creation of an electric reliability organization (ERO) with the statutory authority to enforce compliance with reliability standards among all market participants. The electric industry has had to adjust to the change from a voluntary system of compliance to a mandatory system of reliability standards compliance. In order to deal with this situation most organizations decided to use their favorite weapon – the spreadsheet. It was a great choice given there was a lot of information that needed to be organized in a very short period of time, including: standards, requirements, entities, measures, subject matter experts, applicable procedures, evidence of compliance and the list goes on.
However, once these spreadsheets were filled up with reams of data on dozens of interconnected worksheets, problems began to surface:
- Complexity: Documenting the relationships of each applicable requirement to applicable procedure, compliance rationale for each of the registered entities within the organization quickly becomes a rat’s nest of intertwined data.
- Maintenance: As new and revised standards are released just managing changes to these spreadsheets becomes more then a full-time job.
- Doesn’t Manage Tasks: Analysis of compliance to requirements usually requires assigning tasks, which implies management of assignees, due dates along with documenting the task and the outcome.
- Silos of Information: Spreadsheets by their vary nature are typically owned by one person and are located on that individual’s computer. After a while most companies learn that there is more than one spreadsheet. In fact several people in various parts of the organization are maintaining this information with overlapping data and most of the time without knowledge of each other.
This is when it makes sense to use a corporate-wide compliance management system that can deal with the complexity of the data, can be easily maintained with new and revised standards and manage task assignments, due dates (with automatic email reminders) and associated procedures and evidence.
