(You can get the publication discussed below here for free, under the Creative Commons license found here)
As many of the vendors and enterprises we work with are aware, here at RedMonk we’ve been working on a publication regarding what we call “Compliance Oriented Architectures” for some time. Months, in fact. Put simply, the publication details our vision for what happens when a Service Oriented Architecture is applied to compliance challenges. The publication also describes what we consider to be the core services involved in compliance projects. Services like retention, access control, and disposition management.
A couple of things were apparent to us in our work on compliance, and led to the creation of this piece:
- Many compliance standards – including the big names like Sox, SEC 17a, and HIPAA – have a lot in common.
- Very often, compliance projects are worked on in isolated silos; one hand often doesn’t know what the other is doing
- Compliance projects are ripe for a services approach
Hence, our publication. And now we’re releasing the fruit of our labor for free, under a Creative Commons license. Why?
Several reasons. Some altruism, sure, but it’s mostly a pragmatic decision on our part. Reprint rights are a component of our business model (only after the fact, however, we do not do any prepaid or commissioned research) just as they are for most analyst firms.
But we don’t believe that that means that all of our content should be for subscribers only. We’ve always recognized (would that the music industry would do the same) that there’s an inherent value in freely available content and ideas. It may be indirect, but it’s there. Going forward, we see a role for both paid and free content in our business, and will continue to evaluate publications past and future for similar licensing terms.
More importantly, in the case of this particular publication, we believe that there’s an opportunity to have a lot of rewarding conversations with both vendors catering to compliance and enterprises suffering from it. What the services truly mission critical to businesses? How do they vary from vertical to vertical? Which are realistically implementable, which need maturation time? What experiences have enterprises had with services based approaches? We can’t have these conversations, however, unless the people we’d like to speak with have access to the research.
We’ve therefore chosen to donate this content to the Commons, so that anyone who’s interested can share and build on it if they see fit. Post it to their website, debate it, criticize it, send it to their colleagues – even make derivative works – as long as we’re given credit for our work and any derivatives are licensed equivalent similar terms.
Call it an experiment, if you will – we’ll just call it practical business.
