Nymity provides business-friendly privacy compliance software solutions that minimize time to compliance with the world’s privacy laws, including the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD). Founded in 2002, the global software company reduces complexity for companies developing, managing and maintaining privacy compliance programs.
Nymity provides knowledge solutions, assessment solutions and data subject request solutions to help companies to comply with U.S., European and global privacy legislation.
The Challenge
Decision-makers within Nymity wanted to take advantage of the wealth of knowledge the company had developed in order to build “expert systems” that could “emulate the decision-making ability of a human expert.” Nymity had the content, the expertise and the business intelligence necessary to provide the foundation for such systems.
While exploring how to build and develop expert systems, Nymity concluded that the project would require extensive programming by a large team of developers which would have taken a long time to find, hire and train. Speed-to-market was important and Nymity believed it could find “out-of-the-box” productivity from a rules-based software solution.
Project Overview
Terry McQuay, president and founder of Nymity, had the idea to leverage an enterprise decision platform to power the logic and “thinking” of its Expert Privacy Platform. The company then conducted an evaluation of potential vendors based on their criteria.
Nymity signed an OEM agreement with InRule in 2017. InRule was selected due to its speed and accuracy, low operational costs from Nymity staff and easy integration with Nymity’s existing .NET technologies.
“We were able to work with InRule’s decision platform pretty much out of the box,” said Oleg Lemeshko, chief technology officer, Nymity. “The software did what we needed it to do and integrated easily with our sophisticated infrastructure.”
Solution
Nymity’s Expert Privacy Platform leverages hundreds of automated decisions that perform a wide range of functions across the system. For example, InRule is used in Nymity’s Records of Processing Inventory and Privacy Impact Assessment/Data Protection Impact Assessment solutions to make it easy to capture the fundamental processing attributes of the project which results in the organization building a processing taxonomy. InRule is also used to provide expert notifications based on several factors including the project processing attributes, generate relevant compliance risk annotations and provides informative compliance email alerts based on the role of the user and attributes of the processing.
In May 2018, when GDPR requirements came into force, Nymity used InRule to help its customers meet requirements in an effective, efficient manner. The system learns from aggregating and processing data from all of Nymity’s customers, recognizing patterns so the system gets smarter over time.
Beyond GDPR, a typical month brings new and updated privacy laws from around the world. Nymity is well known in the privacy compliance space for providing the most in-depth and up-to-date operational privacy compliance knowledge base in the industry. InRule allows Nymity to quickly accommodate changes in privacy legislation and propagate updates across Nymity’s solutions in support of the world’s existing and emerging privacy regulations and requirements. As a result, Nymity’s customers have confidence that they always have the most current privacy compliance knowledge available in the market.
Results
The use of InRule has enabled Nymity to realize significant cost- and time-savings. Nymity estimates that InRule has allowed them to do the work of five developers with one developer who only spends about 25% of his time on InRule. It also saves time from the legal team working with developers to categorize and implement the rules in the software.
The company estimates that InRule has saved Nymity over $750,000 to-date. More importantly, InRule enables Nymity to deliver the expert system to its customers that is highly differentiated in the industry and to roll out new rules updates quickly and efficiently across the solutions.
In 2019, Nymity introduced Awareness Tracker, the only compliance solution that motivates and tracks the knowledge of privacy stewards in companies. The solution gamifies privacy awareness by providing leaderboards for privacy stewards within the business based on their privacy knowledge. This motivates them to improve their position in the rankings and drives increased employee engagement. Also powered by InRule, this expert system gets trained by input from both Nymity’s legal experts and the end users themselves. Based on these inputs, InRule makes it possible for Awareness Tracker to predict the most relevant awareness content to deliver every week to specific employees of a customer (targeted by function, country and story relevance). Each person within a company who has access to the tool can review the content that is most relevant to them based on their interactions with the Nymity Awareness Tracker solution.
Next Steps
With the successful release of Awareness Tracker, Nymity has turned its attention to leveraging InRule to predict the specific knowledge needs of individual end users. Privacy officers who have deployed Awareness Tracker to their privacy stewards and other stakeholders have requested knowledge as to what is relevant and not relevant for these individuals. Nymity is working with these privacy officers to develop aggregate reporting of what is most relevant for the privacy office by user.
Nymity is also focused on creating a risk profiling expert system that will predict areas of risk within a business. Nymity will leverage InRule and its enterprise expertise to have the system predict where the privacy risks are located within an enterprise.
“Through the use of InRule, Nymity has been able to build expert systems that allow us exceed our customers’ expectations and requirements, while staying miles ahead of our competitors,” said Terry McQuay. “By using InRule, we’ve been able to get to where we wanted to be in months instead of years at a fraction of the cost of manually programming the systems. We’re confident that with continued use of InRule, we’ll be able to provide even more value to our customers while growing our position in the privacy compliance software market.”
“By using InRule, we’ve been able to get to where we wanted to be in months instead of years at a fraction of the cost of manually programming the systems. We’re confident that with continued use of InRule, we’ll be able to provide even more value to our customers while growing our position in the privacy compliance software market.”
Terry McQuay, Founder and CEO, Nymity
