Posted via email from michaelrice’s posterous

I hope it will help you make a little more sense out of what I’m doing.

Oh, I updated my bio a little too. Now I just have to do it on all those other sites, like LinkedIn.

Over the Thanksgiving break, I’m hoping I can resume my daily Briefings and tell you a little more about a project I’m working on: a manuscript on how to streamline enterprise legal compliance. I’m calling it The (Reluctantly) Compliant Capitalist for now.

Stay tuned, and thank you to my readers (I mean my one reader: mom) for your patience!

photo © 2005 Steve Jurvetson | more info (via: Wylio)

Have you ever heard researchers say that there would be few traffic jams if cars were able to drive themselves? I’m dreaming of some kind of analog for the enterprise to comply with societies’ imposition of regulations. Why not do the same with enterprise legal compliance to make it as effortless as possible by automating compliance?

Think of the power of this. Enterprises could seamlessly integrate any new requirement concocted by politicians, lawmakers, regulators, courts–right down to the city level–with minimized hits to their profitability.

There are already quite a few tweets coming out of the conference:

• @banjaxx #arma2010 customer quote @IBM_ECM booth 710 “… @PSS_Systems made our lawyers too efficient in ediscovery ..” #ibmecm #ilg #ediscovery
• @btblair #ARMA2010 Whew, now that was a packed day. Lots of excitement and action on the show floor. We are at a critical time in RIM history.
• @cchoksy #ARMA2010 Forrester Research session: records managers expect 50% growth in storage in 2011
• @PSS_Systems RT @btblair: #ARMA2010 So far I’ve learned: #InfoGov is hard. CEO should care more. Volume is growing. Cloud is…well, something

(Photo from TechNopal.)

While you’re feeling proactive… If you work in a highly regulated industry like banking, you should try–and I do mean just try–to see what kind of regulatory chaos will be coming out of Congress over the next few years after the recent elections. Still feeling proactive? Take a visit to this post on litigation trends.

The Editor is intentionally trying to avoid all the hoopla over the Ethics 20/20 issues from the ABA. It feels like just a bunch of lawyers doing a lot of hand wringing over social media, and it drives the Editor crazy. If you want to know about some of the concerns lawyers (not necessarily your legal department) have with social media, just Google it.

Speaking of driving people crazy, for an interesting cultural tidbit about the difference between the legal industry and your industry you should read this post. In a nutshell, some lawyers were really freaked out about merit-based pay. Sounds weird, huh?

(Happy Meal image courtesy of noodlepie.)

While not every vendor made it into the sought-after leader’s quadrant, the report seems to pay particular attention to the following:

• BWise, for its extensive risk library, innovative continuous controls monitoring, and combined qualitative and quantitative capabilities. Gartner seemed concerned, however, about flat revenue growth when some other competitors seemed to expand.
• LogicManager, because it seems to be well positioned for the shift to full-blown BPM integration.
• MetricStream, because its sales expanded last year and because it’s going for the big boys that need to accomplish multiple GRC objectives at once.
• Thomson Reuter’s Paisley because its content integration with the Thomson platform, its heavy investment in R&D, and its extensive product roadmap may have positioned it for World Domination.
• SAP BusinessObjects because of its planned platform rearchitecture for December 2010.
• Strategic Thought Group because it seems well positioned for the industry trend.

Gartner is also taking the position that the leading driver of GRC shifted from compliance to broader enterprise risk management concerns. While there’s probably some truth to that, even there metrics aren’t overwhelmingly convincing. Their own study indicated that about 58% of survey respondents selected general “ERM” as a driver while 46% indicated that regulatory concerns like SOX were driving their initiatives. That may be a statistical difference, but the numbers are so close that it looks like companies really just want BOTH.