I firmly believe that the only way that we will be able to achieve truly successful compliance solutions is to have systems that:

· Are individually compliant to their own requirements, (they can look after themselves), and

· Expose that functionality to external systems to allow those other systems to enforce policies, (they allow other systems to manage content in their system), and

· Are able to impose their own policies on content stored in other systems (can look after content in other systems).

All of the above need to be done intelligently, cooperatively and with as high a level of enforcement as possible. This gives us egoistical systems – my yet-to-be-delivered book discusses the attributes of egoistical systems in detail, in fact I rant on about them ad infinitum for a whole chapter.

Got any comments or great examples? email me and I'll be eternally grateful, in fact I'll consider sending you a free copy of the book in exchange!