GDPR Assist - About Me

GDPR Assist®  is my freelance consulting business.  I am a qualified GDPR Practitioner (IT Governance Certificate #984315) and Certified Data Protection Officer (IT Governance Certificate #1000222) using a process-centric approach to help you with your compliance.  

For the last 35 years I have been working in the IT sector, predominantly in the document workflow industry including 14 years with Xerox and another 6 years with 2 of their strategic partners.

Documents are the life blood of any organisation, either supporting the information flow of the business or enabling their customer communications.  Over the decades paper has given way to digital media, however the principle remains.  Whether the document exists as a printed piece, a digital file, a website, an app or a database it's still what Xerox defined back in the '90s - "information formatted for human consumption".

In more recent years my expertise focused on communications management and automation - helping businesses and public bodies design better ways of communicating with their customers, employees and partners. 

Increasingly privacy, data protection and specifically the advent and then arrival of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) became a big part of the conversations I was having with clients.  Some themes seemed to be common:  confusion, frustration and a lack of expertise combined with an awareness that compliance isn't an option - there was work to be done on an ongoing basis and most organisations were struggling to get to grips with it

That's why I started GDPR Assist® - I believe that a simple, pragmatic approach to building GDPR compliance into my clients' workflows not only protects the organisation from penalties and reputational risk but can also deliver competitive edge by building trust between my clients and their customers.

My guiding principle is to understand complexity and deliver clarity and simplicity - I look forward to hearing from you.

Paul Strout