As much as COVID-19 dominates our thinking today, we should also remember two points: data analytics was important before the pandemic, and it will remain important after our global ordeal finally goes away.

Corporate enterprises will still be large, complex, interconnected organizations that span the globe. They’ll still be wrapped in compliance obligations and surrounded by risk. Compliance functions will still be asked (ugh) to do more with less, and to do it more quickly.

On one hand, that’s good news: compliance officers will be able advise senior executives about the company’s risks, and that makes a strong compliance program more important to the strategic position of the enterprise. So as always, I’m still bullish that corporate compliance can be a long, lucrative career.

On the other hand, that also implies a strong commitment to technology as the foundation of your compliance and risk management strategy. To analyze data, you’ll need a single repository of data, with thoughtful and clear taxonomies that tag data correctly. You’ll need versatile reporting, to surface the right answers for whatever questions executives ask. You’ll need to embed automated data collection into policies and procedures across business operations, to reduce the chance of manual error.

In other words, compliance functions will need to do a lot, putting technology at the heart of their operations. That was true when I spoke to those law students in February. It’s true now. It will be true tomorrow.

That’s how we weather difficult times more effectively, such as the one we’re all enduring now.