Outside of your privacy team there are members of your company that have a passion for privacy. While that passion may be driven by something outside of their business lives, their zeal can be leveraged through the establishment of a privacy community.
A privacy community is a group of your company’s employees from various disciplines and departments that are willing to help your privacy team develop and drive initiatives. Members of the privacy community bring perspectives to your privacy program that your team may not naturally have. These perspectives are simply based upon each community member’s job responsibilities, their geographic location, or their personal frame of reference.
Also. with limited resources and ratios of one privacy professional to hundreds (or thousands) of employees in a company, a member of a privacy community that is local to a business unit or a department can provide “feet on the street” for your privacy team. This local advocate can help promote privacy initiatives and assist in keeping privacy “top of mind” in their local organization.
Experiences with privacy communities has shown that through the member’s contributions previously unforeseen issues, concerns, and solutions. Business units and departments that had a tie to the privacy community were more engaged in participating in privacy initiatives as well as identifying and resolving any potential privacy issues.