Data protection continues to evolve, and the global experience of COVID-19 in 2020 has provided valuable lessons to help guide future developments. Digital data and technology have taken on greater importance for economic activity, social connectivity, and public health. Agile privacy regulations and responsible business practices are necessary as businesses and governments operate in a rapidly changing environment to ensure the effective and responsible use of these data and technologies to respond to and recover from COVID-19. We are working from home, shopping, and managing our lives online more than ever in the digital ecosphere. In addition, the digital shift has enticed companies around the world to try to attract customers and employees from other countries.
The growing role of digital data and technology is poised to be addressed with the Canadian government’s innate support for new-age technology. Today, Canada has absolute ownership over the globe on AI and is the first country to have a national AI strategy. On a closer look, the numbers speak up – almost 40,090 new companies sprouted up across Canada that are spinning up a staggering $181 billion every year,” assures Marc Fuentes, Sr. Director of Marketing, Communications and Sales Development, Adlib.
As a result of this dynamic digital shift, personally identifiable information (PII) is being shared in every direction, regulatory pressure is surging, and enterprise oversight is doubling. Companies that don’t have a firm handle on securing PII data risk fines, damage to their brands, and broken consumer trust.
Citizen Data Protectionism
Legislation referencing PII, “personal information,” or “sensitive data,” continues to expand as more governments regard privacy as an essential human right. Take Brazil as an example. The country recently issued Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados, its version of the GDPR. Many other countries have modeled their privacy laws after GDPR because of its explicit requirements for consumer consent. Egypt approved its first standalone data privacy law, which also went into effect last year. India, Thailand, and China have all followed suit with three pieces of PII Security legislation coming down the pike. Many privacy bills are also being considered in the U.S. at state and federal levels.
Marc added, “being able to comply with existing and emerging data privacy regulations from around the world starts with discovering relevant information. The issue is that this type of information can hide within emails, word documents, scanned images, forms, etc. Sensitive information including PII can also be siloed within different systems and departments across an organization, limiting visibility and access to key stakeholders.”
Manual solutions to locate PII are slow, expensive, and leave companies vulnerable to risk from inconsistencies. Adlib’s Content Intelligence Cloud utilizes AI and automation to surface all essential PII data—from multiple sources and in any format—and turns it into searchable content that is ready to be analyzed against any existing and new regulations.
“One of the most impressive things about the pandemic is the inimitable power of personal data and the technologies that facilitate its collection and use,” adds Mike Grainge, Vice President, Product Engineering at Adlib. When the economy was severely shut down because the government issued the stay-at-home order, Internet-based tools, universities, schools, businesses, the government, and other major sectors of the economy and society continued to operate. Retail, shareholder meetings, education, entertainment, and much of social life have gone online. For young people, this is not surprising, only continued the familiar trend, but the current penetration of video calling apps and many other platforms that made the hunkering down easy is surprising. “This digital transformation has resulted in new business models, processes, and data practices in Canada.”
Unstructured data driving new opportunities
Regarding data-based endeavors, unstructured data is a major fallout that resides in many different file shares, servers, drives, and mails attachments. Whether it’s in claims forms, emails, commercial contracts, CAD diagrams, clinical trial documentation, or another document type, 80 percent of enterprise content is unstructured. This unstructured data may be valuable, confidential, business-critical, but is difficult to find and manage. This results in significant "dark data,” information that’s buried or hidden within the organizational documents.“ Adlib’s capture, data extraction, and classification capabilities enable organizations to automate the intelligent ingestion and processing of digitally born or post-scan paper content. Adlib’s Content Intelligence Cloud allows you to extract insights and unlock value from your unstructured data,” points Mike.
In the same light, Adlibs allows customers to access quality data, and in a much quicker way. The ability to deliver pre-trained models that allow these customers to be up and running in very little time.“We have what we call citizen data scientists, wherein, if you look at some of the challenges in today's environment, one of those is attracting and developing talent, especially in the data science space. So, it's cumbersome for organizations to secure these resources, train them, get them operational. Our unique crowd-powered approach allows a business user to train a model and make it work within days, versus following monolithic standards to set up any data systems,” enlightens Marc.
The crucial role of data in any business’s success is so monumental that even oversights in contracts can cause an exorbitant amount of damage. According to McKinsey, 9% of Fortune 1000 companies suffer from poor contract management, and sub-optimal contract terms – it’s close to $2.3 trillion. Contracts are either a business driver or an expensive, risky, time-consuming document. To avoid the latter scenario, enterprises must make every effort to understand where their contracts reside, mitigate risk, and leverage value. “Our Contracts Analytics solution helps businesses, increase visibility, accelerate review, simplify compliance and mitigate risk. We have also developed a Contract Analytics Risk calculator to crunch the numbers to reveal just how well your contracts are working for you,” informs Mike. Participants are asked a series of nine questions about their company, their contracts, and how much time and money they spend analyzing these agreements. The responses are calculated, and results are generated at low, medium, and high estimates. “Leaders will find out immediately how much the lack of advanced Contract Analytics is estimated to be costing them,” adds Mike.
Adlibs has been instrumental in liberating its customers and partners from the clutches of obscurity regarding their contract management. “One of our life sciences clients was experiencing a high amount of data that they needed to bring together from clinical trials to submit to FDA. There were other global regulators to approve a particular drug. One thing is the high amount of actual data. The other piece is creating a perfectly rendered PDF document that can be submitted," starts illustrating Mike about the challenges. Adlibs created perfectly rendered PDFs, which proved more consistent with the FDA and the global regulators. And with consistency and speed, the life sciences firm brought these products to market faster. So, Adlib’s solution offered them a fully automated PDF transformation offering that enhanced their capabilities to capture data; helped reduce costs; improved the quality of the submission. All this while ensuring that consistency is enabled for regulators to easily navigate and approve the submissions. The result was phenomenal. The customer, over time, benefitted from a savings of almost $1.7 million for being able to not only distribute the content in a consistent manner but way faster. And this didn't even go into a factor in that bringing that product to market. “That’s how, we helped them improve compliance, increase the time to market, and ultimately save and protect lives,” concludes Marc.
Data needs oxygen. Adlib Content Intelligence Cloud delivers the vital oxygen enterprises need to transform their growing unstructured data into intelligent data – to maximize the potential of people, workflow, and technology. Data for the sake of data is just data. But data that has been structured and transposed to intelligent data gives new meaning to data and its possibilities are endless.
Adlib creates better data that amplifies human potential and maximizes business performance. “Our content intelligence and automation solutions make it easy to discover, standardize, classify, extract and leverage clean structured data from complex unstructured documents. In doing so, our global customers reduce risk, simplify compliance, automate processes, and enter a whole new level of performance.”
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