Regulators are very busy people.
Whether you’re a regulatory executive, an operations manager or front-line staff, your hands are full with the daily business of overseeing your charges: of licensing, investigating or disciplining professionals; of inspecting or enforcing against businesses; of monitoring the members or businesses within your mandate.
It can be hard to find the time to step back and really think about your business, and the way you’re going about it.
You’ve probably developed key performance indicators that you report to senior management, the board, and the public. Along with these, you may monitor other reports, such as benchmarks, turnaround times, workload reports, and task reports. You may have undertaken surveys of your stakeholders, to determine their awareness of and satisfaction with your work. You may have undertaken process reviews to improve operational efficiency. If you’re an executive or manager, you are keenly aware of your budget and resource constraints, and the pressure to do more (a lot more, no doubt) with less.
Ask yourself the following questions.
- Is your enabling legislation very prescriptive about your regulatory actions, leaving you without much discretion to determine how best to conduct your regulatory work?
- If not – how do you determine where to allocate your resources, and how to prioritize your work?
- What role, if any, does the control of risk to the public play in your daily work?
- Does your organization consider itself to be primarily an enforcer of regulation? Or do you also work with your regulated members or businesses to enhance their compliance?
- Do you take into account the responsiveness and attitude of the regulated member or business in determining a regulatory course of action?
- What role do other entities (such as other government, other regulators, community agencies, professional associations, etc.) play in your work?
The fact is – there is no one right way to go about your regulatory business. But that does not mean you don’t have to think about and apply strategy to your work.
Thankfully, many great minds have pondered these questions. In an upcoming post, we’ll talk about some of the operational models that have been developed, including:
- Right touch regulation
- Risk-based regulation
- Smart regulation
- Responsive regulation
- Really responsive regulation
- Problem-oriented regulation
Regulatory Solutions for the 21st Century 