SmartSuite for the Policy and Governance Manager

Consistent compliance methodologies apply your policy framework, templates and document hierarchy across every domain, so a standard written by Security and a procedure written by HR look, read and route the same way.

Review and approval automation sends each draft to the reviewers and approvers its tier requires, with sign-off recorded, so a board-level policy and a departmental procedure each get the approval the framework specifies without manual routing.

Policy distribution and attestation management publishes a policy, tracks acknowledgements and automates follow-ups and review cycles, so a campaign to the whole organization is scheduled once and the non-responders are chased by the system.

Regulatory change visibility tracks updates, runs impact assessments and routes changes to stakeholders automatically, so the Regulatory Change Manager's new obligation lands on the policies that must change, with an owner and a date.

Cross-functional transparency gives the General Counsel, the HR Operations Manager and the Ethics and Compliance Lead the same draft, comments and status, so a policy review is one thread on the record rather than three email chains.

Data and evidence traceability links each policy to its controls, procedures and evidence, so when you publish a revision the Control Owner sees which procedures it affects and the downstream update is a task, not a hope.

Full histories of drafts, approvals, publications and decisions are kept, so when a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 auditor or a bank examiner tests a policy they read the approval on record rather than asking who signed it.

Start with one policy set and scale across regions, divisions and frameworks without rebuilding, so a subsidiary's local addendum sits under the group policy in the same hierarchy with its own owner and review cycle.

Use the AI Assistant in a SmartDoc field to draft the compliance narrative for a policy or summarize the controls it governs, so your Policy Analyst starts a revision from a draft grounded in the mapped obligations.

Compliance Director

The Policy and Governance Manager owns the policy lifecycle: the framework, templates and document hierarchy, drafting, review, approval and publication, attestation campaigns and acknowledgement tracking, periodic reviews and exceptions, the mapping of policies to obligations, frameworks and controls, audit-ready records of versions and approvals and the reporting of policy status and attestation completion. The outcome is that every policy is current, approved and traceable to the obligations and controls it implements.

Policy Management manages drafting, review, approval and publication of policies with version control, automated review scheduling and attestation tracking. A policy is drafted from the template, reviewed and approved with each version and approval on record, published, and acknowledged by the employees who must attest, with the next review scheduled automatically. The Policy Analyst runs the workflows and the General Counsel and Ethics and Compliance Lead approve in the same place, so the record is complete without assembling it.

Each policy is mapped to the obligations and controls it implements, so a framework gap surfaces when a policy lapses rather than when an auditor finds it. Control Framework & Regulatory Libraries supplies the frameworks, from ISO 37301 and ISO 27001 to NIST SP 800-53 and PCI DSS Requirement 12, and Regulatory Change Management shows when an obligation changes so the Regulatory Change Manager and the Policy and Governance Manager can see which policies need review.

Policy exceptions and overdue reviews are tracked in Issues Management as actions with owners and dates, so an exception granted against a policy has a rationale, an owner and an expiry, and an overdue review is an action against the Policy Owner rather than a note in the manager's inbox. The Control Owner sees the exceptions that affect their controls, and the record of every exception is there when an auditor treats an unmanaged one as a finding.

SmartSuite reports attestation completion and policy currency by department from the register and attestation records as they stand. The Policy and Governance Manager can show the Compliance Director or Chief Compliance Officer which departments have completed attestation, which policies are past their review date and where exceptions are open, with the HR Operations Manager seeing the same completion for the people side. The report is the record FINRA, the OCC's heightened standards and CMMC assessors ask for.

New customers can start with SmartSuite Onboarding, a guided four-week program around one or two priority workflows. For a policy program the first workflow is the register: load it with owners, versions, approval dates and review cycles, which immediately shows what is overdue, then map policies to their controls and launch the first attestation campaign. Templates and the document hierarchy are set so new policies are drafted to the standard, and the Policy Analyst takes over the workflows from the first cycle.