Managing Compliance Software

Managing Compliance Software

I have just published on my linkedin blog a little essay on managing software used for the purpose of compliance. One key insight which one might consider is that these programs are being used because you have to not because you want to. Also society does not want businesses innovating the compliance software, we need to know it does what society requires not what the business wants. This makes the governing super strategy for these applications one of “operational efficiency”, or in Dan Remenyi’s model, a “support” system. For compliance systems it is advantageous to buy or adopt a package and to adopt the package’s optimum process; society has confidence that companies are complying with the law, and the companies share the maintenance costs and get a superior product and support. In some cases, the requirement that society has confidence that compliance is correct leads to the regulators giving companies the software or running it themselves.  …

Influences on my economics

There are three books which have changed my thinking about economics over the last few years. I originally questioned whether these books are revolutionary but they have added to my thinking in very basic ways. These books all look to address the economics of information, or the wealth unleashed by I.T. and the internet. My thinking about this started in the early 1990’s, Dan Remenyi at Henley Management School introduced me to the ideas that Information was the 4th Factor of Production, that Industrial Age economics was insufficient as it was unable to explain why companies that invested in negative or zero profit IT projects, as measured by ROI, outperformed those that didn’t, and that an industrial age balance sheet was incapable of evaluating an information system asset.

The three books all relate to the evolution of society and its economics, the empowering of knowledge workers and their relationships with Capital, and hence capitalists. …