Privacy Nexus is the privacy management software developed by Privacy Company. We asked Frank Koppejan how a consultancy firm came to develop its own software.
Privacy Company is club of consultants, what led you to develop your own software, Privacy Nexus ?
From our consulting experience, we knew that some things are very time-consuming, but not (always) very complicated. Think about creating a register of your processing operations. That is part substantive analysis, but mostly about collecting and maintaining the right data.
In the distant past, I used to do this by doing interviews, then recording them in Word or Excel documents, reconciling that and then saving the result somewhere. The outcome of all that work was something that made no one happy and was poorly manageable.
You could hardly make updates, you would have no audit trail and it was difficult to ensure proper access security. Put flatly: either everyone sees everything from everyone else or no one sees anything.
All this needed to be more convenient, and it turned out it could be more convenient. In addition, the GDPR requires more privacy registers. For instance, of data leaks or inspection requests. So we added those too.
What type of companies was it developed for and who in that organisation are the users?
In principle, the software is useful for all companies and organisations. What we do see is that very small companies that process very little personal data have less need for this kind of tool. And the very large companies sometimes have very specific requirements or wishes that are less in line with the thinking behind our software.
Very roughly speaking, our clients range from organisations with around 50 employees to organisations with many thousands of employees.
Users are diverse. From system owners to data protection officers. From privacy officers to board members. From privacy champion to line employee. And that is how it should be. Together, users can ensure that their organisation is compliant and extract as much insight as possible from the available data.
How does your software help Privacy Officers in large organisations, what problem do you solve that other solutions do not?
We help organisations meet their privacy administration obligations in a user-friendly way. Our starting point is the employees and not the privacy experts. Instead, we want to enable organisations to collect and keep track of the information actually required in an easy and convenient way.
This may sound trivial but it is not. It requires that we provide sufficient help and oversight to non-privacy experts. Otherwise, the privacy officer or data protection officer still has to do all the work themselves.
What further characterises us is that you can get started right away. It's not like you need a months-long consultancy process or certification in our software first. So to speak, you can start your project within an hour. Of course, we can train you and we have help documentation available. The bottom line is that we hope you will need those as little as possible.
What developments in the software can we expect in the coming year?
We have just introduced a new GDPR knowledge base and are now working hard to make assessments simpler and more comprehensive. Information from assessments will become easily reusable within your processing register and vice versa, so you never have to enter information multiple times.
Furthermore, an increasing number of new assessment types are being introduced, such as the LIA (Legitimate Interest Assessment), DTIA (Data Transfer Impact Assessment) and FRAIA (Fundamental Rights and Algorithms Impact Assessment).
What are customers' experiences?
We see a lot of happy customers. There are customers to whom we only supply the software and who start using it themselves. The nice thing is that they manage to set everything up without our help. That makes me happy, because at the core, that is what we want to enable them to do.
There are also clients where we actively help. These kinds of activities are often projects that need to be done on top of existing work. The advantage of also offering consultancy is that we are able to unburden them with that. The aim remains that this should be a client’s own choice.
Want to learn more about our software or request a free trial account? Then send us a message.
