By the time you read this blog post the US Presidential election should have been decided.  Whichever side of the political fence you sit on, Obama or McCain, one thing is clear; the first order of business for the new President will focus on restoring confidence in financial markets.

The President’s ability to really influence the crisis will be an interesting sidebar as it plays out.  Rupert Murdoch claims there is little they can do to help but much they can do to make the situation worse.  He fears the effects of protectionist policies on globalization but I think we also need to consider the costs of an ‘avalanche of regulation’ aimed at righting the wrongs of the current crisis.

It is clear the market has failed and where markets fail, governments have a responsibility to step in and regulate. The upside is, we don’t repeat the mistakes of yesterday. On the down, with regulation comes compliance and cost. Cost, when corporations are already struggling with a heavy compliance burden and the effects of a down economy.

Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) is a growing market segment sized by GRC Analysts, Corporate Integrity at $52.1 Billion in 2008. There is a thriving technology sector delivering solutions for GRC.

I have been having a series of discussions with analysts and players exploring the connection between Component Content Management (CCM) and GRC. There is a huge opportunity to include CCM solutions such as Author-it, in the GRC mix to fill the gap in current GRC solutions where the rubber meets the road… Policy and Procedure documentation and training materials.  It is via this documentation that a corporation educates its employees on how to be compliant and holds them accountable.

Compliance in this parlance is about people, processes and systems, all of which must be documented. And if they are to be documented, you better have a process for managing the content that goes into this documentation.  CCM concepts such as reuse, single sourcing, multi-output publishing and localization all play a role in providing an efficient, auditable and ultimately compliant result.

We are into phase two of a three phase project with a major US financial institution as we speak.  This project is all about compliance, efficiency and cost savings.  Author-it is enabling them to create policy and procedure content from business units all around the US, store this content in a central repository, update it in a controlled fashion/workflow and then deliver it via a dynamic web output to tens of thousands of employees. The solution allows for multiple variants of policies and procedures based on criteria such as geography and business unit.  These variants are resolved at publishing allowing for a dynamic, employee specific document.

It is a fabulous example of how CCM can successfully breach the GAP between GRC and the compliance coalface, your employees.
Cheers
Steve

Posted by Steve Davis, President, Author-it Software Corporation