Cloud Technology: Driving better regulation with data analysis and artificial intelligence

Applying leading cloud technology to regulation

Cloud technology, project management tools and advanced search capabilities enable agencies to analyze regulations and complete rulemakings faster with precision and accuracy.

How are agencies expected to tackle these responsibilities with hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations, guidance, and other agency directives? With existing internal resources, many regulatory agencies risk the inability to fully comply with these rules due to the intensive labor needed to meet these requirements.

New technological advances in natural language processing, flexible workflow tools, and big data analytics can overcome the current challenges and provide a faster route to efficient and accurate regulatory improvement.

It’s been 22 years since the average federal regulation was last updated

Esper’s proprietary data analysis techniques dynamically analyze federal regulations over time and detect important dates associated with a regulation or policy such as the date it was authored, effective, and last updated.

The information from Esper demonstrates the opportunities to use analytics to generate quick, actionable insights.

Finding a regulation of interest takes a user at least five separate screens if they know exactly what they’re looking for.

Rulemakings pass through at least nine stages and often take over a year to complete

The federal rulemaking process is governed by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) (5 U.S.C. Chapter 5) as well as a number of executive orders, agency directives, and internal policies.

Its various stages can be difficult to manage without project management technology to ensure team alignment and success.

State governments also have their own unique internal administrative processes that mirror the federal process.

Some states have found innovative ways to modernize their processes. For example, Colorado’s process requires the review of enforcement data to evaluate what regulations need review due to lack of clarity.

The average federal regulation contains 2,617 characters

Some policies contain over 600,000 characters and take over six hours to fully read

Given the overwhelming scale of regulations, agencies often find that significant portions of their code are in need of review.

This can mean that the regulations contain repealed references, have high levels of restrictions, contain prohibited language, or other important considerations.

Outdated regulations are only some of the common bottlenecks for regulatory progress within agencies. Other common sources of regulatory hurdles are related to agency internal operations.

Regulatory management challenges

• No unified regulatory calendar: Non-standard planning across bureaus or agencies can create communication gaps that result in missed deadlines for rulemaking stage completion.
• Unclear internal communication and ownership: Without a dedicated resource tracking action items and what team members are responsible for particular tasks, projects can be delayed or dropped entirely.
• Difficulty in group collaboration: Numerous stakeholders are engaged in rulemakings yet they have limited infrastructure that supports collaboration for regular tasks like redlining, suggesting edits, or reviewing analytics.

Closing considerations

Proper management of regulations will always require human oversight and effort. New technologies are not a regulatory panacea and shouldn’t be considered one. However, new advances in workflow and analytics technologies promise to free up time and resources to spend on knowledge labor in place of manual regulatory work and encourage regulators to apply their subject matter expertise on the areas that matter most.

About the authors

Maleka Momand is the CEO of Esper, a regulatory technology company she co-founded with Joe Lonsdale. Prior to starting Esper, she worked in Silicon Valley and witnessed first-hand the impact of regulation on innovation in the private sector. Today, she works with governments to provide industry-leading cloud technology that promotes accountability, data, and oversight in the regulatory process. Maleka is the former President of Argive, a regulatory non-profit and serves as an advisor to the Cicero Institute. She calls Austin, Texas home.

Connor McCarthy is the Chief of Staff at Esper. Prior to his work at Esper, he assisted entrepreneurs as a policy advisor to Joe Lonsdale at 8VC and as a partner on the Market Development team at Andreessen Horowitz. He has also served as a healthcare and tax policy analyst at Capitol Counsel. He graduated from Georgetown University with honors in philosophy. He also is an advisor to the Cicero Institute.

About Esper

Regulation plays a critical role in the health and safety of the people and the well-being of our economy. In order to make good policy, governments need a sophisticated way to create, track, and manage administrative rules.

Esper currently partners with numerous governments to provide a secure, cloud-based platform to support the review, creation, and management of regulation with attention to data and impact on the business community. Numerous states have partnered with Esper to support their administrative process needs.