Compliance and Solitaire

solitaire

Compare playing solitaire on your computer against using a deck of cards to play solitaire. The computer won’t let you cheat. You can’t put the card on a stack if it doesn’t belong on that stack. The rules are embedded in game’s software.

Ultimately, that should be one of the goals for compliance. You want the business rules to be embedded in the software applications that run your business processes.

Of course, for many things that is really hard to do. The rules of solitaire are simple. The rules for compliance are often not. (Maybe that means you need to simplify some of your rules.)

Richard Susskind, author of The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, uses this concept in explaining the future evolution of legal services. I found it equally useful when thinking about embedding compliance into business processes.

What do you think?