May 25, 2018 was the day: after years of preparation, a new privacy law came into force across Europe: known in the Netherlands as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and abroad as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). On that date, almost every organization in the European Union was required to demonstrate compliance with the rules in the new privacy law. But that law did not say how to demonstrate that. In short; a nice challenge.
A dream
The privacy law had been talked about and worked on for years. Because we want to help our customers solve problems as quickly as possible, we started back in 2014 with Privacy Company. Indeed, it was clear to us even then that the topic of privacy was going to get the attention it deserves.
The dream began with the idea that a team of fun people actively working together could help clients comply with the law. For our taste, the subject of privacy had too few cheerful people who wanted to make it a little fun for clients, too. And no, not everything is allowed by the privacy law. Nevertheless, it can still be (very) fun and there are a lot of great solutions to problems.
A team
When the first people joined our team, the power of a group of people quickly became apparent. Different people with different backgrounds provide additional insights and take the subject beyond the fine print. We knew from experience that there was a lot of low-value repetitive work to do. Interviews to gather facts and then recording that in Word or Excel. A lot of consulting hours that didn't really make anyone happy. There had to be a more convenient way to do that.
With the arrival of our developers, it became even clearer that we could work with them to come up with technical ways to make things better: faster, more convenient, cheaper. In this way, by using our software, which had a different name at the time, our consultants were able to spend as much time as possible with our customers doing the things that really added value for the customer.
A vision
Privacy was a subject of specialized lawyers and experts. All tools then, and many tools now, were aimed at that audience. Hard to understand terminology, many nuances and exceptions. In other words, unworkable for those not in that world. That had to change. Our application also had to be suitable for people who are not experts. For people who only deal with the subject occasionally. So we decided to focus on collecting information in a standardized way. Just clear facts, like, for example, the system is hosted in England. Based on those facts, we add intelligence through the software. For example, that after Brexit the legal privacy situation became different.
And we saw that in organizations with some scale, not one person has all the answers. So that meant we wanted to not only make the application usable by a broader group, but also make it easy to collaborate.
A product
A vision and an idea are nice. In the end, only the execution counts. That execution requires many technical and design choices and costs time and money. We chose a number of turns that slowed us down, but fundamentally improved the product. For example, we decided that only an overview of processing provides limited insight. So we also added systems. And there were more such choices.
We also saw that by standardizing and adding explanations to questions we could make the application accessible for a large group of people. So not just the experts. And that it can be useful to collect and add information in phases. Sometimes the elephant needs to be divided into smaller bites.
We finally went live in 2015, and fortunately, we quickly got our first client.
A customer
You are creating an application to make customers happy. Customers are the reason for the existence of the application, and they are the path to a better application. Our own advisors and our customers provide us with feedback for improvement, from look and feel to full functionality. Their usage is the basis for our next steps.
Management
The next stage is management. In a subsequent blog, we will explain that privacy management is like a little garden. You have to trim and water the plants and then you get beautiful flowers.
In this blog series, we will touch on a different aspect of Privacy Nexus each time to demonstrate why our software is the number one privacy management
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