This guide will help practitioners evaluate the performance of their program -- to evaluate whether their program is delivering true business value.

 

Over the past few years, organizations have focused a lot of time, energy, and resources on designing, implementing and improving compliance and ethics programs. Some executives are appropriately asking “Is all of this work really working? Are we actually and factually delivering outcomes that really matter?" While the art, science, and practice of program evaluation is still in its infancy, there are several sound practices that organizations of all sizes can use to understand the answers to these questions. As we approach program evaluation, it is important to remember that compliance and ethics management is fundamentally similar to -- NOT fundamentally different from -- other enterprise processes. As such, we can use tried and true techniques to evaluate our programs.

 

So, with all of that said, what should we evaluate? What are the goals of the evaluation? Generally speaking, there are two types of evaluations that you should consider: “effectiveness evaluation” and “performance evaluation.” The former helps an organization meet minimum requirements. The latter helps an organization optimize investments in its compliance and ethics program.