Quocirca Reports | Quocirca Articles | Key Analysts | Questions & Answers
Managing Intellectual Assets
The increasing impact of local, regional and global compliance rules on the financial markets cannot be overstated. The need to identify, control and manage formal and ad-hoc information assets is growing - and has to be built on a suitable storage infrastructure.
Key Findings

  • The compliance burden is growing and shows no signs of abating
    Significant requirements have been imposed in recent years - SOx, Basel II etc - and new EU requirements (e.g. MiFID) this year further update the financial services regulatory framework and encompass more and more products and organisations.
  • To date, approaches to compliance have treated each requirement as a separate entity
    This has meant many different ‘point' solutions for compliance, and therefore a need to check each against the others to ensure that one view has not distorted another and that there is one version of the ‘truth'. As the regulatory burden changes, further individual solutions will exacerbate this problem, adding to cost and complexity.
  • What is needed is to treat information as a corporate asset
    A single piece of underlying data should only exist once, but should be capable of being used in different applications - this would bring significant benefits from an overall business as well as a compliance perspective
  • A ‘Compliance Oriented Architecture' presents a way forward
    Such an architecture should be able to identify and capture information at the point of creation, should be able to apply security and tags based against a corporate policy and must be able to index the information to make identification easy.
  • Such an approach would bring significant business and IT benefits
    It would enable compliance to be demonstrated more quickly and easily as well as enabling the business to better respond to market pressures. Treating information as a "service" means that performance can be measured in terms of the service levels delivered, increasing the focus on a service-based culture within the organisation.

Conclusions
Compliance can often be seen as an intolerable burden; building another compliance application and ensuring its consistency with existing solutions is time-consuming and expensive. However, with building the appropriate architecture, data can be captured only once, tagged and indexed and used by a range of applications. Rather than seeing data management for compliance as burden on the organisation, changing the organisation's mindset can present an opportunity to improve not only compliance but wider business performance.