My first bar exam review topic? What else, but agency law. Section 1, subparagraph A of my outline says, “Agency is a consensual fiduciary relationship where one person, the agent, agrees to act for and under the direction or control of another, the principal.” The outline authors cite to me the Restatement (Second) of Agency sec. 1.

Abstract, clinical, and pointless sounding definitions like this are, of course, why I did so well in law school. For some reason my brain latches onto this stuff. I’m good at it. But I also understand that the outline authors miss the most important point when they start off like this–the point that makes the study interesting to everyone else: who cares?

And the answer to that question is actually interesting because, usually, somebody is going to be accusing someone of being an agent when they did something bad. For example, a real estate agent who botched a transaction, or a guy driving a company truck backed into your Mercedes. Suddenly, that abstract issue can have real life implications.

I was listening to a free hour with Robin Sharma on my iPhone Audible app today, and he had some good advice: just go for 1% per day. His point is all the great things happen slowly, but with persistence. So, here’s my 0.01 for the day. I made some mild improvements to the Complykit website, created a Nabble email list for Complykit, and added some skeleton code based on American wage and hour regulation.

As it turns out, there are some really interesting wage and hour regulations that I think will  showcase the kind of features I want to demonstrate in Complykit very nicely. Even something as simple as complying with minimum wage can be kind of complicated sometimes. And it’s a problem that almost everyone in the business world understands, so it’s a good starting point. (Sheesh, it’s even a good ending point: PeopleSoft was practically built on stuff like this and even rebuffed a $7 billion offer from Oracle once).

I mocked up some code based on what I learned about the wage and hour compliance requirements tonight and pushed itto the Complykit repo on Github. Click around a little, Github will make you giddy.

Finally, I took some screenshots of the skeletal code to make a few improvements to the Complykit homepage. There’s still not much there, but I hope you’ll sign up for the mailing list. That way I can stop talking to myself, and I can start talking to you.

I’ve been throwing around the term “business process” for the last fifteen years, so I thought I should review the term as I start drafting a book about automating enterprise compliance.

I call something a “business process” when I can see a set of tasks that a business does, I can see the connections among the tasks, and I understand how the set of tasks makes a business succeed.  Of course, there are fancier and older definitions of the term, but my definition is just practical.

I think of everyday, routine business processes as those that most enterprises do pretty well and cheaply. While there’s always room for improvement, routine processes like hiring or firing, buying widgets, entering into trade contracts, and the like things most enterprises know how to do pretty well.

Compliance, for the most part, isn’t really one of them… At least not the kind I’m thinking of. I think most enterprises understand how to pay their taxes or send various reports to various agencies, but few are good at the kind of compliance I’m thinking of: a kind of continuous enterprise compliance that’s aware of new regulation, adheres to that regulation, and responds to disputes just in the ordinary course of everyday business.

Instead, every time a new law or new regulation shows up, it causes disruption and costs that could be avoided if it continuous enterprise compliance were just a garden variety business process.