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Do your part for the Biden Administration's National Cybersecurity Strategy

March 9, 2023

Do your part for the Biden Administration’s National Cybersecurity Strategy

The Biden Administration's National Cybersecurity Strategy emphasizes the need for collaboration and coordination between different regulatory bodies to ensure a consistent and effective approach to cybersecurity. This call for harmonization and streamlining can be applied to all areas of regulatory compliance. The question is, how do we streamline and harmonize our existing compliance requirements?

Manually harmonizing regulations is not recommended due to legal and time constraints, as well as poor outcomes. Instead, a three-step approach involving a compliance corpora, semantic similarity methods, and a compliance dictionary should be used to streamline and harmonize regulations effectively.

You need a corpus

A corpus is a collection of written texts that includes Authority Documents and internal compliance documents. To streamline compliance mandates, you need to have a list of those mandates, which becomes your corpus. There are multiple corpus management tools available such as Common Controls Hub and SketchEngine.

You need Semantic Similarity Tools

AI writing tools like ChatGPT are popular due to their use of semantic similarity methodologies. For those interested, the paper "Using Hybrid Semantic Similarity Methods when Examining Corpora with Limited Content" on ResearchGate explains these tools in depth. Professionals, such as our team at Unified Compliance, use these tools to judge similarity in text, which is important for streamlining and harmonizing compliance mandates.

And you need a Compliance Dictionary

Organizations have different groups with varying agendas and users with different levels of familiarity. Compliance terms need to be considered, as each regulation and standard has its own language and definitions. Automated compliance dictionaries extract terms and definitions from guidelines and compliance documents to aid semantic similarity tools and guide compliance implementation.

Achieving defensible harmonization

When harmonizing and streamlining documents, consider these questions:

- Are the documents stored in a structured database or just jumbled together?

- How are sentences analyzed and tagged for primary and secondary predicates and subjects?

- Is there a process to include tagged terms in a bespoke dictionary for shared meaning?

- Is there an analysis of the necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities to implement actions in the documents?

- Is there a process to convert predicates into implementable processes, assets, or records?

The Unified Compliance team is using the same three-legged approach the Federal Government’s National Cybersecurity Strategy uses to streamline and harmonize regulatory compliance. If you subscribe to the CCH, you get the benefit of this approach. If not, isn’t it time to do so?

What to do about it…

We are pleased to announce that we are extending our harmonization APIs and tools currently available on the federal level to state and local government agencies. Contact our team to learn more.

We have several options for corporations and other organizations that wish to streamline their own internal compliance content with our mapping tool.

Have us do it

Learn to do it

Determine who should do it