Greatest Challenges for Making Effective Policy?

Policy drives innovation. This is true for any organization. An effective policy can redefine an organization’s future and, when backed with the power of the federal government, can change the world. However, for a policy to leave such an impact, it must be engaged by a trusted organization throughout the entire process, from inception to implementation to maintenance, in order to ensure transparency, reliability, and effective decision-making.

Through the LMI Way of Policy, LMI has identified several key challenges at each stage of the policy life cycle to help guide organizations through these key issues, while avoiding predictable pitfalls along the way. By navigating such key challenges, including integrity in data-sourcing, cultural buy-in, validation, and policy management, an organization can ensure its policies are effective in achieving its goals.

Challenge #1: Sourcing Reliable Data for Driving Decisions

Ensuring an organization’s data is reliable and usable is a crucial challenge in maintaining existing policies and creating new ones. Without trustworthy data-sourcing, organizations risk making policy decisions without supporting data, which leads to inefficiencies, compliance issues, and potential harm to stakeholders. By maintaining an organized set of pre-existing policies and datasets that can serve as a source-of-truth, organizations can confidently analyze and compare existing policies to identify gaps or areas requiring improvement. Namely, if a decision is only as reliable as the data supporting it, an organization is too. 

The LMI Way of Policy supports data integrity via its customizable Beacon™ data management and analytics platform to reliably store, access, and analyze unstructured and structured data, enabling organizations to make data-driven decisions responsibly.
 

Challenge #2: Creating Organizational Buy-In to New Policy

One of the significant challenges in policy making lies within an organization’s culture and leadership. Too often, leaders are quick to make decisions but are reticent to complete the necessary due diligence to follow up on a policy’s effectiveness. Such lack of communication between policy development teams and end users can lead to excellent policies that have no real-world applicability. At LMI, we recognize the importance of fostering a culture that promotes collaboration, transparency, and accountability. By encouraging open dialogue and inclusivity, we create an environment where diverse perspectives can be heard, and self-interest is aligned with the collective goal of effective policy making.

The LMI Way of Policy achieves organization-wide collaboration by bringing in all stakeholders as part of its data collection phase to ensure cultural buy-in during the policy creation process. This enables all end users to contribute to policy creation as part of the end-to-end support the LMI Way of Policy offers.

Testing policy adoption through management system validation and program evaluation involves understanding how users will interact with the proposed policy to ensure it meets their needs. This process places a key role in gathering buy-in from the users affected by the policy as well. Maintaining such ownership during organizational change requires a clear understanding of who will be responsible for the implementation and enforcement of the new policies. User validation coming from this maintained ownership is particularly essential to identify any potential issues or concerns users may have with the proposed policies. Effective task ownership and policy understanding at all levels in an organization, especially at the testing stage, is necessary to ensure the new policies are properly implemented and enforced across all levels of an organization.

LMI has a great deal of experience in testing policy adoption through the LMI Way of Policy’s collaboration between LMI’s digital analytics service lines and management advisory service lines in support of maintaining and implementing updates corresponding within management systems for the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid services for several decades.
 

Challenge #3: Maintaining Effective Policy

Policies are not static documents; they require ongoing management and periodic evaluation to maintain their relevance and effectiveness. Routine check-ins, ownership within organizational changes, regular testing, and renewing the value of policies are essential aspects of policy management. LMI embraces a proactive approach to policy management by establishing robust monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. By working with organizations to establish key performance metrics up front and outlining a framework for assessment, we ensure policies remain aligned with the evolving needs of the stakeholders and adjust as necessary to optimize their impact.

LMI offers organizations the ability to evaluate a policy’s effectiveness more accurately by utilizing its newly developed Ask LIGER (LMI Instruction-tuned GEnerative Resource) tool that enables organizations to use GenAI to rapidly identify impacted documents and processes that are affected by newly implemented policies.

Key Takeaways

Effective policy making is a multifaceted endeavor that demands addressing various challenges. By acknowledging and actively addressing common issues at each step of the policy life cycle, organizations can avoid these common challenges and ensure their policy is effective and long lasting. Additionally, partnering with an organization experienced in identifying these key challenges up front and able to provide end-to-end policy solutions is an effective way of avoiding these issues. After all, with policies holding the ability to shape organizations, who wouldn’t want a trusted partner to show them the challenges along the way. 

LMI Mission

At LMI, we are committed to helping organizations navigate these challenges through our inclusive culture, data-driven approach, stakeholder engagement, and proactive policy management. By doing so, we strive to make a positive difference in policy outcomes and contribute to the betterment of society.