Digital transformation in schools is well advanced and will continue at pace as new ICT solutions built for the school market are developed and refined.

Most schools have gone a substantial way down the digital transformation pathway, although there are some glaring gaps. This article will highlight some digital transformation gaps in the area of risk and compliance. The article suggests that, without digital transformation, schools’ risk and compliance activities will be limited in scope, inefficient and fail to deliver real value to schools.

What Is Digital Transformation?

“the process of developing organisational and technology-based capabilities that allow a company to continuously improve its customer experience and lower its unit costs and over time sustain a competitive advantage.”

We would add to this that digital transformation also helps schools improve the way that they manage risk and ensure compliance, particularly as the legal and regulatory obligations for schools become more complex and demanding.

A key question for schools is therefore:

“What are the risk and compliance systems and processes that could be enhanced and made more effective through digital transformation?”.

We set out a snapshot below of four areas where digital transformation can lead to positive outcomes for schools in risk and compliance.

How Can Digital Transformation Help Schools with Risk and Compliance?

Issue Reporting and Management

Digital platforms can allow schools to report, manage and capture incidents, accidents, near misses and compliance breaches, from anywhere and at any time, usually with a customisable single form. The benefits of these platforms include the ability to:

• create and customise forms, checklists and workflows
• assign checklists and forms to staff to validate that key areas of compliance are in fact being managed effectively
• conveniently and securely maintain records
• capture more issues/incidents due to ease of use
• access aggregated issue/incident data to identify patterns and trends and which serve as an early warning for emerging risk and compliance issues.

These platforms are therefore an improvement on paper-based reporting procedures which are onerous, don’t easily facilitate consolidation and are difficult to maintain.

Risk Management

Managing risk in a regulatory dynamic environment such as a school is incredibly difficult. The use of specialised software solutions enables schools to develop an integrated risk management system that allows everyone in the organisation to use a common framework, terminology and methodology for risk management. This prevents risk silos from developing and allows for visibility of how risk is being managed across the school by the management team and the governing body.

Policy Management

Policy management systems ensure that policies and procedures are accessible to staff so that they always know what to do. The features of these systems usually also allow for linking of related policies, providing a single source and repository for all policies and preventing policy silos or unofficial and out-of-date policies having currency in some departments or locations but not others.

Staff Training

Policies and procedures are important because they help schools to effectively manage risk, fulfill their compliance obligations and operate with integrity. However, they are only useful when they are understood and being used correctly by staff. Therefore, ensuring that staff are trained in organisational policies and procedures is critical. Unfortunately, as regulatory requirements increase, training staff members becomes increasingly harder. Online learning systems help with this by providing a single access point for inductions, ongoing training and professional development so that schools can quickly and comprehensively train staff. These systems usually also allow schools to create their own targeted courses and then assign, track and report on staff learning.

Conclusion

Almost all schools are on the digital transformation journey with risk and compliance systems, with some much further in their journey than others. Accordingly, if schools don’t already, they will soon come to realise the significant benefits that digital transformation will have on the effectiveness of their risk and compliance systems. Importantly though, digital transformation requires iterative improvements over the long term to the way an organisation operates. So even those schools that are further along in their journey than others will need to continue to leverage technology to increase the effectiveness of business operations and support continuous improvement to benefit the organisation, their customers and other stakeholders.

Filip Manganaro

Filip Manganaro is a Senior Legal Research Associate at Ideagen CompliSpace. He has a law degree from the University of New South Wales.