GDPR has been one focus of my work for over a year, and the level of interest in GDPR compliance has exploded in the last couple months. Lots of people are now scrambling to try to meet the end of May deadline, motivated often by their interactions with their business partners who are also working on compliance.

I've spent a lot of time interacting with potential clients lately where I feel like I'm successful in educating them on how big this GDPR work normally is. But the end result is usually that I convince them to either hire someone willing to do short-sighted work (and, in my opinion, waste their money AND increase their risk). Or they end up deciding not to do anything.

Hopefully, this information will be of benefit to anyone who has any kind of GDPR work to do but isn’t familiar with GDPR or maybe even formal privacy management. And hopefully, those who reach out to me about their projects will do so knowing that I’m going to tell them there’s no GDPR easy button.

It isn’t uncommon for businesses to have real rules and defined procedures that impact compliance but that are not written down. You could have a valid compliance program that is not all in writing.

I won’t be trying to convince people that they absolutely HAVE to spend money and precious time documenting businesses policies and procedures to satisfy a regulator who may have little likelihood to pay them a visit.

But there are several other reasons why small business owners should spend their money and someone’s precious time to create at least a basic set a business policies and procedures for their business or healthcare practice. And they're reasons that usually have bottom-line financial impacts.

I used to say I got my start in privacy and compliance in 2002 when I moved out of technical writing and IT consulting; but a while back I found evidence to disprove that assertion, when I found the complete policy and procedure that I wrote in 1984 to govern how my high school's homecoming festivities were going to work.

Okay, NOW it's starting to get real. After 2 months of working with a diligent, but rather inefficient web designer, we've decided to go live with the site. We still need to get all the detailed content populated to our pages in the Services section, but that's coming along fine and should be added soon.