We started with VSQs because they’re rarely addressed in a comprehensive and focused way. It’s a space that benefits significantly from deliberate choices in process, appropriate usage of technology, and a cohesive, integrated view of how each part of an organization contributes.
A high-quality VSQ is grounded in up-to-date, cross-company information. Part of the reason VSQ work is so onerous is that there is a knowledge management problem in mapping the experts needed to answer a VSQ to the organizational reality of your company.
Rather than building a product that focuses on trying to solve a subset of the VSQ problem, we decided to provide a service that takes the whole problem off your plate. Delegate those problems to us, and we’ll make sure your answers are high-quality and reflect your company’s strengths. We’ll also help you glean insights that might otherwise get lost between organizational ownership functions.
We start with establishing a comprehensive knowledge base for your company. It captures the unique ways your company operates, and allows us to take those operations and map them to the common expectations of Security, Privacy, Compliance, and other specific questions that are asked during a VSQ. For example, we review your production auditing practices against a set of comprehensive and ideal expectations we’ve generalized across VSQ questions.
The foundational Insights we gather are based on generalized practices that we have identified as critical to an organization's success in answering VSQs. These are based on the aggregation of our expertise, industry-standard frameworks, compliance frameworks, regulatory frameworks, and the common patterns in questions we’ve answered for our clients over time.
From our understanding of your infrastructure, we transform that knowledge into structured data to help drive decisions. For example, we show the percentage of your production auditing practices that map to your policy statements, present the most compelling aspects of auditing practices to your customers, or map those practices to common Compliance or Regulatory requirements.
These knowledge transformations also create a consistent method for measuring changes and operational evolution over time. As your company evolves we want to show that growth to your customers in your VSQ answers. This provides a feedback loop to the teams driving that progress, so they better understand what is most important to closing deals.
We also work to provide any relevant customer feedback to the teams driving this growth, so they can take that information into account as they drive progress over time. We have seen this information assist with prioritizing Engineering efforts, enabling proactive identification of gaps in process or policy, and streamlining operations by ensuring strengths and weaknesses are well understood.
We’ve spent several years learning what our clients’ needs are and how the industry is falling short. The market is saturated with solutions, but many problems persist. Why is this the case?
Not all teams using off-the-shelf VSQ tools are specialists in the areas they’re expected to cover. Security, Privacy, and the industry as a whole are not static. Over time, it becomes difficult for team members to ascertain when a historic VSQ answer is no longer accurate or has become irrelevant. For complex, engineering practices like Security, you need to track both the state-of-the-art and your company’s progress towards that ideal. This requires reconciling a combination of how people, process, and technology work together to present your choices to customers with appropriate context.
The current market pushes strongly towards using Generative AI to make computers accountable for decisions. There are a lot of pitfalls to this. Primarily, a computer cannot justify why it generated the text used to inform a decision – but the company is ultimately still accountable for the consequences of that decision. Experts need to validate Generative AI answers to ensure they’re not hallucinations, or contextually inappropriate, or you’ll be on the hook for the consequences of that decision.
If inaccurate answers persist in knowledge banks, they will be consumed by your staff, databases, and any AI systems they have been introduced to. Most companies expect that solving this problem is a shared responsibility, but without a single accountable owner for tracking that information down and maintaining and continually verifying a single source of truth, inaccurate data will propagate over time.
VSQ answers can also be specific to one client's engagement, and without the proper treatment, could end up in other VSQs falsely representing those engagements. Answering a VSQ requires context that isn’t always communicated explicitly, and having someone maintain that context for unique or outlier answers is extremely important.
Bottom line: keeping information up-to-date, accurate, and making sure the conclusions you draw from that information are trustworthy is hard. Our goal is to make that easier for you.
Reach out to learn how Repliance can take answering VSQs off your plate, and strengthen your sales enablement process. Contact us!
