My book is almost ready to publish so I wanted to start to share some excerpts from it. The book starts with an overview of  what compliance is and why you should be interested in it. Here's a section copied from the introduction of the book. I'll be publishing more thoughts and more ideas that I discuss in the book as well as a summary of the sections over the next few weeks.

The book should be available on Amazon, B&N, Books a million and my own site within a couple of months. If you have any questions, queries or comments then please contact me at:

comments@nevertalkwhenyoucannod.com

Imagine a dark and sinister area deep in the bowels of a building; an area that most people did not even know existed. Inhabited by people with strange powers to find things that mere mortals could not even imagine.

Visitors to this strange, murky world slip bundles of paper through a slot in the wall, eager hands grasp at the papers and hide them in folders. Folders labeled with strange, colorful hieroglyphics. The folders are carefully placed in special boxes and stored lovingly on to shelves. The visitors are left wondering if they will ever see their precious papers again but feel strangely confident that the inhabitants of this dank, shadowy underground world will care for their charges and ensure their protection until they are doomed to a carefully staged and monitored destruction.

What am I describing? A view in to Area 54, a chapter from Harry Potter VIII, a plot from a lost Star Trek episode? [1]

No, this is the vision that people have of the typical records management office, medical records store or drawing office in a company. We have all been there, every company has somewhere where critical business information is stored.

Depending on the size of the storage location it might have been the basement of the office building or in some cases a massive, custom-built warehouse. This location was where you took critical business documents when they needed to be stored as records. The idea was that the people who worked in the records centers were tasked with understanding the appropriate regulations and then protecting your records for the prescribed length of time. They also tracked who had the copies of the records and ensured that they were returned when they were no longer being used.

Is this model flawed? Absolutely not – consider the prerequisites for developing a compliance system for managing business records – you need people who understand the compliance standards, a process to ensure adherence to them and technology to manage the process. The people who run these data centers are typically extremely professional and dedicated to their task. They battle internal and external politics and do their absolute best to ensure that the company is in compliance to records retention, public health information protection, or whatsoever the requirement is.

The problem is that things are changing in the world of compliance. As you know, the amount of data, the number of systems and the number of regulations are all increasing so rapidly that the current ‘silo the data to protect the data’ approach cannot scale to meet our requirements.

The future is upon us and we had better drag compliance kicking and screaming out of the bowels of the building…don’t worry, I am not going to start trying to write science fantasy again but you get the idea – we need to embrace the brave new world, understand how to remain compliant and also reap the benefits that technology can bring us.

When you’ve finished reading my book you should have a good feel for what’s available, what’s realistic and what’s to come. Hopefully you’ll also get some aid navigating the maze of solutions too.

Good luck – I’ve seen the future and it really is bright!

[1] Having read these paragraphs I hope you’ll appreciate why I am writing a book on compliance not a science fantasy novel!