business – J. Howard, CDO & CPO

The rules around protecting the privacy of customer and employee data are becoming one of the most complex business risks (not necessarily highest risk). With no single federal law, organizations face a complicated patchwork of state regulations (like those in California and Virginia), all while new Artificial Intelligence (AI) rules are beginning to overlap and add even more complexity.

This paper cuts through that complexity. It presents a simple, practical framework for a modern privacy program, focusing on the essential “what” must be achieved, not the highly detailed “how.” The goal is a program that is easy to understand, aligned with business strategy, and nimble enough to keep up with the law.

Three Pillars of a Resilient Privacy Program

To ensure continuous compliance, managing risk, and ready to respond, privacy programs can be thought of as built on three essential, functional pillars: Steady State, Change Management, and Response.

I. Steady State: The Foundation of Continuous Compliance

This pillar is about maintaining a clear, current understanding of what data is on hand and what can be donr with it. It focuses on the recurring activities that maintain compliance day-to-day.

Key Component	What It Does for the Business
Inventory of Data and Processes	What personal data is collected, why, and where is it stored. What permissions are attached to it? This is the single most critical piece of information, as it dictates all other requirements (e.g., disposal deadlines, security needs).
Inventory of Obligations	A clear view is needed of all applicable regulatory requirements (e.g., state laws) and contractual agreements (e.g., what promises are made to clients or what vendors commit to do).
Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM)	Vendors and partners are a disproportionate source of privacy risk. A formal process is needed to assess how they handle data, which is often overlooked in favor of standard IT security checks.
Risk and Controls	Areas of greatest exposure must be identified and proportionate safeguards in must be put in place. This includes employee training and technical controls to limit who can access sensitive data.
Incident Response	A formal plan for responding to privacy breaches or misuse of data is essential. This allows for quick action, remediation of vulnerabilities, and the ability to meet strict regulatory notification deadlines to minimize reputational and financial harm.

II. Change: Integrating Privacy by Design

This pillar proactively manages new risks that emerge in connection with new products, services, or large projects. It ensures that privacy is a fundamental design element, not a reactive checklist at the end.

Key Component	What It Does for the Business
Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs)	This is the mandatory checkpoint for “Privacy by Design.” It’s a formal analysis to determine if a new initiative poses a high risk, ensuring the Privacy team is engaged early in the development cycle, long before launch.
Regulatory Change Management	The legal landscape is constantly changing. It suggests a formal process to monitor new laws, determine their impact, and implement necessary control changes before they take effect.
Process and Control Changes	A mechanism to engage the privacy team when business or IT process changes impact how personal data is handled. This prevents unauthorized, or “shadow,” changes from introducing new vulnerabilities.

III. Response to Inquiry: Demonstrated Accountability

This pillar focuses on the auditable evidence and response mechanisms that prove the program is working and demonstrate transparency to both regulators and data subjects (i.e., customers/employees).

Key Component	What It Does for the Business
Data Subject Rights (DSR) Management	People have a legal right to ask us what personal data an organization has have on them and how they’re using it. This drives the need for a streamlined, auditable workflow to intake these requests, verify identities, and fulfill them within strict regulatory deadlines.
Regulator Requests	On occasion, a regulator may inquire about a privacy program. Having a clear response plan is necessary to efficiently provide the required evidence and documentation, often leveraging the data from the Inventory and the DSR process.
Measurement and Continuous Improvement	Tracking certain operational metrics is key (e.g., number of incidents, time to fulfill DSRs) to monitor the effectiveness of the program and identify areas that require management focus and resource investment.

Executive Summary

The growing complexity of US privacy law demands a highly organized and resilient compliance framework. To navigate this challenge, we must focus on structure (the three functional pillars), process management, and enabling technology.

By proactively investing in and leveraging specialized privacy technology platforms, management of these intricate requirements can be automated. This approach achieves defensible compliance while keeping operational costs managed, allowing the business to drive forward with reduced risk.

The modern corporate privacy program, especially within mid-size enterprises, has inadvertently evolved into a major source of operational complexity, frustration and friction, often disproportionate to the actual regulatory risk it seeks to mitigate. Instead of being designed as a streamlined risk management function, programs frequently become bloated, slow, with checklist-driven mandates built to satisfy the compliance demands of every fragmented state law individuallyand equally. This approach leads to “checklist paralysis,” diverting excessive time and budget towards documentation and reviews rather than focusing resources on the small subset of truly high-risk, sensitive data—the company’s “crown jewels.” The result is a system that is overly expensive, strategically inflexible that creates tension between the mission-oriented departments (development, sales, delivery) and the control-oriented groups (risk, compliance, legal).

To combat this complexity, organizations must pivot from a purely centralized compliance model to a hybrid that includes distributed, risk-balanced privacy program execution. This alternative design requires strategically moving certain privacy activities out of a central department and embedding them within the business functions that create, gather, storeand process data.

The foundation of this distributed model rests on three pillars of activity across the organization:

Strategic Governance (Central Team): The central function shrinks to focus only on program stewardship, high-level policy, external regulatory change monitoring, risk modeling, and overall accountability. It defines the “what” and “why.”
Embedded Privacy-by-Design (Engineering/Product): Department-level individuals are trained to own the initial privacy decisions (with consultation where necessary). They are responsible for implementing data protection, data minimization and purpose limitation controls at the system design level, making the program proactive rather than reactive. This operationalizes the core tenets of the principles-based framework directly into the creation of new products and services.
Automated Execution (Operations/IT): This is where Privacy Management Platforms (PMPs) become the essential enabler of the right-sized program. Cloud-based PMPs distribute the workload for high-volume, repetitive, and resource-intensive tasks without distributing the risk.

By leveraging these platforms, a company can automate the most common compliance burdens: maintaining automated data inventories, standardizing and deploying consent banners, and managing the workflow for Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs). This automation drastically reduces the risk and the need for expensive, manual labor—the biggest driver of complexity and cost—allowing the distributed staff to focus on genuine innovation and high-value risk mitigation.

In conclusion, right-sizing a privacy program requires a strategic trade-off: trading centralized control for decentralized accountability, and trading manual compliance for automated execution. This approach removes unnecessary friction, lowers operational costs, and transforms privacy from a bureaucratic hindrance into a sustainable, competitive edge that fosters enduring customer trust.

Tag: business

Overcoming the Privacy Complexity Trap: Right-Sizing Privacy for Strategic Advantage