What Is Compliance Management Software

Compliance management software is the system an organisation uses to hold its compliance obligations in one place and show it is meeting them. It records which rules apply, who owns each one, what training and policy sign-off has been completed, and what happened when something went wrong. The defining feature is the audit trail, not the interface.

The clearest way to understand what the software is for is to look at the standard it serves. AS ISO 37301:2023, the Australian adoption of ISO 37301, sets out what a compliance management system needs. An identified set of compliance obligations. A risk assessment against them. Controls, competent and aware people, documented information, and regular evaluation of whether any of it is working. Software is how most Australian organisations run those requirements without drowning in spreadsheets. The standard replaced ISO 19600 and is written to be proportionate, so a 40 person business and a 4,000 person one are expected to do very different amounts.

In practice the software carries:

• an obligations register, so the rules that apply are written down rather than held in one person’s head
• risk assessment against those obligations, with named owners and review dates
• competence and awareness tracking, so training is matched to the role rather than issued to everyone
• evaluation, because a system nobody measures tends to decay quietly

It is worth being equally clear about what the software does not do. It will not interpret your obligations for you, and no system on its own makes an organisation compliant. Obligations differ across states and territories and change over time, so treat this as general information rather than legal advice. Standards Australia publishes the full ISO 37301 framework if you want the source.

Posts tagged here explain what this software does and how Australian organisations put it to work. To see a working example, look at Sentrient’s compliance management software and the wider compliance management system it sits inside.