The DailyWTF is a sexy site, and when I saw this post on The Fudge Factories, I was thinking about how true this must be in so many organizations.

Many businesses are so blind, and many business managers have no clue how the computer systems that is thrust upon them really works and takes regular operational business decisions.

Today, Line 56 had this post on Compliance. The theme was how lack of visibility, non-compliant procedures, is costing organizations billions. Here are some excerpts.

Despite the large amounts of money enterprises have recently had to spend on consulting, change management, training, and software in order to become SOX compliant, there is disturbing new evidence that much of that investment simply does not offer visibility into non-SOX-related compliance processes.

As proof that visibility = prevention, consider that enterprises with best-in-class visibility had fewer non-compliant events than the rest of the survey respondents.

Manual compliance visibility is just about meaningless.

The readings from the above two stories is crystal clear.

1. How do you expect LOB Managers to be able to get a view into their system, and how it takes decisions? You need to see it first, to be able to mitigate your business risk, quoting from Line 56.
2. Do you expect your business managers to suddenly become tech gurus, and start diving into their database stored procedures to see the business rules that drive operational decisions.Ha! Nice try! I was writing about one such use case yesterday in a post on CEP in Order Management.
3. How do you expect LOB Managers to shoulder responsibility for lapses caused by computer systems that they cannot even understand or comprehend?

So, what is need?

1. Manual processes cannot give you accurate insight into your compliance efforts. You will get screwed in your external audits. You need to automate your business processes.
2. But, of course, you need to remember that Process Automation is Not Equal to Business Decision Automation.
3. And, Spreadsheets only help so much in your compliance efforts.
4. You also need visibility into how your system takes its decisions to evaluate your compliance levels, and prevent any lapses.

What is the solution?

1. Automate your Manual Processes using a area specific automation solution, like Ariba.
2. Capture, externalize your business rules using a Business Rules Management System (BRMS).
3. Automate your business decisions using a Business Rules Engine (Comes with a BRMS)
4. Use Reports of the business rules, rule engine audits,along with the process automation & management solution to prove compliance.