Mare Nostrum

Fear-mongering

If you read our compliance-related marketing materials, you'll notice a theme that might not be echoed in the industry at large. As Doug Henschen of Intelligent Enterprise says, most vendors rely on the fear-sell for compliance. Law suits! Audits! Jail time! Angry investors! Godzilla!

OK, we can probably leave out Godzilla. Unfortunately, rampaging radioactive reptiles sound not much worse than the nightmare scenarios about non-compliance.

We strive to be consistent in both our design philosophy and marketing about compliance. You can't discount the risks of non-compliance, but you want to put compliance behind you as quickly as possible. An even larger fear than criminal and civil penalties is the loss of productivity. The motif is less Toho Studios, and more Kafkaesque: no one wants to live in a world where they waste time documenting what work they did today, archiving that documentation, documenting the archiving, responding to feedback about the documenting and the archiving, documenting the response to the feedback, scheduling meetings to review the archiving and documenting and feedback...This is the way the world ends, not with the bang of Godzilla's giant foot, but the whimper of bored, unproductive people.

That's yet another why you can't make compliance a separate application. It has to be embedded in the tools people use, in ways that are (in order of preference) invisible, helpful, or painless. Otherwise, you might as well slap a giant Portal To Hell logo on your "compliance application," because that's how your users are going to treat it.

[I can neither confirm nor deny that the previous post was a threadbare excuse to post a picture of Godzilla on this blog.]