International Compliance Priorities

Life at EMC can be cruel and heartless, take last week for example; I was forced by upper management to attend our annual European Documentum user conference in Monaco. If you have not have the pleasure of spending a week on expenses in somewhere like Monaco then you should make this happen at least once in your life! The location was amazing...the conference was pretty good too.

Let's cut to the chase...the differences in priorities in Europe were noticeable, here are the main things that I noticed:

1. Records Management was not their primary focus. They were all much more interested in solutions that pertained to specific regulations rather than the more general retention-focused issues.
2. eDiscovery was being handled on a more ah hoc basis. This was not such a surprise given that the threat of expensive litigation is much lower outside of the USA. Most customers expected this to change in the near future.
3. SharePoint was not such a focus. This surprised me a bit given that Microsoft have done a good job of marketing SharePoint globally.

My conclusion was that currently companies are focusing their efforts on specific areas and just addressing the minimum number of compliance requirements and not taking a holistic view of the problems. Here's the question then:

Is the US leading the way or over-reacting?

I think that most people believe that the rest of the world are 2 - 4 years behind the US in compliance management. Most people inside of the US that is. Another way of looking at this is that the rest of the world are simply taking a more considered approach to this problem and are not wasting precious resources on unnecessary solutions. I guess that only time will tell who is right!

Comments

[Dave]

A couple of things I'd like to mention as food for thought here. First, it's not so much that SharePoint isn't a focus, it's that the prevailing attitude around Microsoft in Europe is relatively negative. Still involved with ongoing anti-competitive/trust law suits, the Microsoft brand does not carry well in European countries who have been showing their dislike by being heavy adopters of open-source and local technologies. Suffice to say Europeans are stand-offish when it comes to implementing Microsoft technologies, and SharePoint probably scares the hell out of them. Second, it would be in my humble opinion that it is the grossly litigious nature of the United States that has lead to its "lead" in compliance. Retention is very important to government bodies in Europe, and is definitely evolving or "catching-up" to the U.S. there, but the Globalization of Compliance will likely be the big trigger in Europe for any increased importance directed towards compliance. I say this having just returned from the DLM Forum meetings on the development of MoReq2 - a pan-European certification for records management - where the issue of, "how does an organization manage all of the differing regulatory requirements of individual E.U. countries with one solution?" ruled the day.