There’s a problem with how most companies think about compliance. Walk into any office and mention the word and watch people’s eyes glaze over. Rules. Restrictions. The department that says “no” to everything. For years, that’s exactly what compliance looked like at Juniper Networks until Bill Burtis showed up with a different idea.
When Burtis accepted the role of Chief Compliance Officer at Juniper Networks in February 2020, relocating his family from Europe to California as the pandemic hit, he inherited a function that employees saw as policy police rather than business partners. The Integrity and Compliance Group had a reputation problem. People avoided them. Questions went unasked. Issues stayed buried.
Burtis saw something different. He saw an opportunity.
From Policy Police to Business Partner
Starting at Juniper in 2015 as senior director of the Integrity and Compliance Group for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Burtis had already spent years understanding what made compliance work—and what didn’t. His nine-year mission at Juniper centered on transforming compliance from a necessary evil into a strategic asset.
The shift started with something deceptively simple: listening. Burtis made it his priority to understand the company’s strategic direction and the unique challenges faced by individuals and their teams. You can’t change culture by decree. You change it by showing up, building relationships, and proving your value one conversation at a time.
His colleagues started calling him a “great connector”, someone who genuinely cared about people and invested in understanding their world. He made building trust and becoming a trusted adviser his top priority, working to establish what he and his team branded as ICG 2.0.
Making Compliance Human
The traditional compliance playbook doesn’t work. Hour-long training sessions that people click through while checking email. Dense policy documents no one reads. Generic hotlines that feel like reporting to Big Brother.
Burtis didn’t follow the playbook. Instead, he launched a campaign built around a simple hashtag: #SpeakUp. Stickers went up around offices. A quarterly internal publication called Integrity Insights spotlighted compliance topics and shared real-life examples from internal investigations, keeping details anonymous but providing transparency about what happened when people crossed lines.
Training got reimagined through microlearning—15 to 30-second scenario-based questions delivered through the Qstream platform. Employees could learn on their phones, in digestible bursts, tied to situations they actually encountered. Burtis attended training sessions throughout the year, interacting with local and global attendees, showing that compliance wasn’t some distant function—it was right there with them.
He worked closely with CEO Rami Rahim to implement an Integrity Helpline and an interactive “Ask a Question” section where anyone could anonymously inquire about ethics issues. Obtaining compliance information hadn’t always been this easy or simple, Burtis noted.
The Results Speak
The transformation showed up in data. In 2021, Juniper scored incredibly high on the “Comfort in Speaking Up” category in the company’s annual integrity survey. Employees increasingly came directly to Burtis and his team to report unethical behavior without fear of retaliation.
But perhaps more telling than any metric was what happened to the ICG’s reputation. One colleague noted that Burtis elevated the brand of ICG from burden to value-add, transforming how people saw the compliance function.
In 2023, Compliance Week named Burtis CCO of the Year. It was a recognition that came from former and current colleagues, vendors, and stakeholders who’d watched the transformation firsthand.
Building for the Long Game
Burtis leads a team of over 25 compliance professionals scattered across the globe, and he’s built something rare: a compliance function people actually want to engage with. He cultivates an environment of transparency, trust, and accountability, letting team members own their projects while maintaining a culture of support and challenge.
His message to every employee, starting on Day 1, is simple: Every employee has the ability and responsibility to shape the company’s culture. That’s not corporate speak. That’s belief backed by systems that actually work.
In December 2025, Burtis joined ServiceNow as Senior Vice President and Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer, bringing more than two decades of experience to help scale trust in one of the fastest-growing technology companies.
The lesson from Burtis’s decade at Juniper? In today’s market, high-trust organizations are differentiators. Every customer seeks to partner with someone they can trust, and compliance is fundamental to that vision.
Compliance doesn’t have to be the department people avoid. With the right approach—one built on relationships, transparency, and genuine care for people—it can become exactly what Burtis proved it could be: a competitive advantage.
