As you know, I’m working on a book I call the Compliant Capitalist. It tries to solve the problem of streamlining enterprise legal compliance. My hypothesis is that an enterprise needs three key business processes: (1) awareness, (2) adherence, and (3) dispute resolution. The awareness process becomes aware of legal compliance issues and the adherence process ensures, well, adherence. Dispute resolution is irrelevant to this post (I think).

The problem I’m meditating on tonight is how to use software to bridge the awareness and adherence process.

So, I’m messing around with rules engines like JBoss Drools and Jess to see if they might help. I have a feeling they are too complex and the IT absorption rate is still too low, but it’s an intriguing idea. I just wish there were lighter, faster, and simpler guides for getting started with Drools.

I can’t believe I finally bought into Cyber Monday, but I did–for myself! O’Reilly was selling all their e-books for 60% off, and I couldn’t resist. But I also wasn’t really prepared. So, I picked a few things at random.

First, I bought Beautiful Code by Andy Oram. I was a huge Code Complete fan back in the day, so I’d love to read something a little more modern.

Next I bought a pretty new edition of Enterprise JavaBeans. Yeah, I know… don’t look at me that way. As much as I wanted to get something about Rails or Python or something, I just realistically don’t have the time to invest in any new languages right now. And besides, I really love Java–even now. And it’s still a huge factor in the enterprise, and I think I want to use it for QuickComply and OpenECA. So there.

Finally, I took a flier on The Art of Community by Jono Bacon. I thought I might get around to reading it eventually, but it’s been the one I can’t stop reading. Bacon really hit a nerve when he talked about the importance of belonging. I have these huge intellectual  ambitions  that pulled me all over the map, and I really miss feeling like I belong anywhere.

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.

Last night I did quite a bit of work to clean up my blog presence. I think it activated my brain, I was up late (again), so I wrote a page about What Keeps Me Up at Night.

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.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me. If you’ve been following my various efforts, you know I’ve had a few false starts with a few different blogs (Legal Tech Wire, What Legal Wants, QuickComply, etc…). They were all great ideas if I just had more time, but I don’t. So, I just want to consolidate it all here.

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!

Indeed, Dominic Barton, McKinsey’s managing partner, himself said it:

I think I finally found the perfect niche for me: how to automate enterprise legal compliance.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.

Headline news: Forrester’s Chris McClean published a new report and wrote a post suggesting that GRC vendors need to stop “chasing” the latest regulatory push and need to start marketing the “real” benefits of GRC. According to McClean, those benefits are “process improvements, risk and loss reductions, and support for more informed strategic decisions.” I’m not sure I’m ready to adopt Mr. McClean’s value proposition for GRC, but I sympathize with the sentiment.

Compliance news: There’s some interesting commentary on the NY Times DealBook about the Dodd-Frank whistleblower protections and its impact on corporate America. Speaking of whistleblowers, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks might be Time’s Man of the Year.  In other regulatory news: there’s an interesting new article by Thomas Fox on the some big news from the SEC on the FCPA front, and an interesting article on the Swiss regulatory agency called the FSB, “a regulator for our times.”