I spend my time at work setting strategic direction for our compliance products. I decided that writing a book would help me to get focused and think things through more clearly. The impetus to write this specific book came from a quotation from Elliott Spitzer, the Attorney General of New York. Spitzer’s classic quote was:

“Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail.”

I believe that this quotation encapsulates the mindset of legal and business leaders today. We are struggling to understand what it means to be compliant – in the absence of this understanding we protect ourselves with extreme measures. We follow Spitzer’s advice and try to protect ourselves by restricting our actions. In order not to implicate ourselves we restrict the use of technology and develop inflexible processes. Alternately, we take the other extreme and simply ignore the problem assuming that we can be reactive when forced to be – or simply hoping that it will be someone else’s problem.

Spitzer’s quotation encapsulates the attitudes of legal and business leaders today. Right now, as you read this introduction, thousands of ‘c-level’ managers are yelling at their staff – “Are we compliant yet?”. There are many books that try to define what ‘being compliant’ actually means; they encourage you to think about compliance in terms of defining criteria and controls. There is no doubt that without these you cannot have effective compliance. However, this book looks past criteria and controls to discuss the systems and methods for implementing successful solutions. We will analyze the type of systems available to solve compliance challenges and we will look at the future of successful compliance in industry. More importantly we will see how to purchase, engineer and implement solutions which will be as future-proof as possible.

Be warned, my book contains as much bad news as it does good news. There are few utopian solutions out there today but the landscape is changing and it is changing for the better. Even during the 12 months that I spent writing this book things have changed so dramatically that I truly have hope for the future of compliance in business. If we can just stop the lawmakers from adding any new burdens on us for a while we might even be able to catch up!

I hope that you enjoy reading the book - if you want to review an advanced copy and are willing to give me feedback that I can quote on the book cover then please email me.

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