'Tis the season. Jingle bells. Santa Claus is coming to town. Santa and the elves have always had to work hard to keep up the list of who's naughty and who's nice and maintain their extensive North Pole operations. Today, though, there's so much digital information about online activity, wish lists, toy-making supplies and more, that it takes much more than periodic elf reports to keep the holidays running smoothly. Like any business that must monitor and manage compliance and digital risk, the North Pole needs analytics.

In a world full of digital risk, holiday magic is not enough to ensure and monitor sound records management and compliance. Imagine if Santa's workshop, one of the largest global operations in the world, leveraged artificial intelligence, automation and analytics alongside good data policies and practices. Communications monitoring, data retention and collection of the massive volumes of data needed to maintain an accurate and up-to-date naughty and nice list would be possible. Letters from hopeful children could be reviewed, sorted and fed into toy development and delivery plans, automatically, in the tightest of timeframes (like the 12 days of Christmas). Confidentiality could be maintained for every child around the world and data sources from every corner of every country could be understood and organized. Such a system would allow Santa and the elves to ensure everything was accurate and defensible according to a universe of digital information.