Document:                      QT-447
Date of Publication:          March 27, 2008
Number of Pages:            4
Lead Author(s):                M. West
Price:                              $195 USD

QuickTake Summary:

Portland, Oregon-based SaaS service provider EthicsPoint focuses on turning ethical and compliance issues into business practices that reach beyond HR and corporate attorneys’ offices to support actions and provide benefits throughout the organization. Founded in 1999, EthicsPoint focuses on highly regulated industries such as banking and financial, mining, health care, pharmaceuticals, retail, manufacturing, and transportation. These organizations operate under very precise, demanding business regulations that carry severe penalties for non-compliance, including in some cases possible prison sentences for CEOs, CFOs, and other senior managers. Complicating this environment further, many of these companies operate in multiple geographies (e.g., USA , Canada , European Union , Japan , India , China , and Russia ) worldwide and are subject to different sets of regulations in each of those geographies.

Despite the far reaching nature of many of these regulations, compliance and ethical enforcement activities in many organizations have been confined to a few specific operating silos such as HR, corporate security, and legal, and have been conducted either on paper or on spreadsheets, making the procedures difficult to share across the organization.

EthicsPoint leverages SaaS technology to deliver vertical industry-specific methodologies, workflows, and templates based on the best practices and experience of its growing communities of users in each of those industries. It fosters those communities through regional and national user meetings (six regional and two national meetings planned for 2008) and through a user bulletin-board system on its site, designed to foster direct discussions among its users. Often users begin by using EthicsPoint to replace less formalized methods in one area of their operations and then expand it until it reaches throughout the business.

EthicsPoint’s greatest innovation, however, is in its philosophy concerning compliance and ethics. In many organizations these issues have been seen as the concerns of specific departments – HR, corporate and data security, and legal. EthicsPoint has turned proactive issue and event management into business practices that reach through all enterprise functions and provide ROI and other business benefits rather than being purely defensive activities attempting to avoid penalties. This philosophy is expressed in a four-principle approach:

1. Alignment of the process to the organization,

2. Awareness of the process throughout the organization, freeing it from entrapment in blind silos,

3. Management, including establishing consistency of outcomes across the enterprise, and,

4. Insight based on business analytics.
   

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