Content and Compliance Challenges Deliver Opportunities for Info Pros
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

Abstract

Tim Buckley Owen reviews the recent FreePint articles on the theme of content and compliance and mulls over the signficant role that information professionals can play in ensuring that their organisation's current and historic information is easily discoverable. There are also opportunities for demonstrating how information professionals are essential to the compliance process as the importance and regulation of compliance increases.

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With regular revelations of new corporate misdemeanours like banks mis-selling interest rate swaps to small businesses or fiddling the LIBOR inter-bank lending rate – not to mention the alarming discovery of horse meat in some European beef products – it’s hard to imagine the flow of regulatory changes abating any time soon.

But one person’s meat is another’s poison, as the old saying has it – and in this instance it’s surely information professionals whose mouths should be watering. Even in a tough employment market, there seem to be plenty of opportunities for astute info pros in the compliance field, and that is what this FreePint Report: Content and Compliance investigates.

Take FATCA – the United States Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. Many enterprises simply can’t find the information they need to enable them to comply with it, it seems – and United Kingdom financial institutions could also be torn between FATCA requirements and British bank secrecy and data protection laws.

It’s just one of a number of upcoming issues on which info pros might consider reskilling – a top professional goal for American LinkedIn users and the subject of our first article. And the second continues the theme, with a raft of compliance developments from which info pros could profit.

Besides tax avoidance, there’s also the risk of mis-selling when banks use social media, and the growth of corporate investigation opportunities. In this respect, even a downturn can be good news, prompting increases in fraud litigation, asset tracing and insolvency work.

Discover & Locate Key Documents for Compliance

When it comes to locating the documents you need to meet your compliance obligations, some academic and public libraries may actually be ahead of the curve. In a review of available discovery interface tools, Jonathan Jacobsen explains why smaller information units should consider introducing them too.

Outlining the kinds of features both commercial and open source discovery systems offer, Jonathan – who works for a small consultancy – makes the crucial point that, by indexing multiple datasets, they can bring information out of silos. He also warns that pushing data to the surface like this can make typos and errors in the source documents – or even simply different practices over time – painfully obvious.

So transparency is what such tools can potentially deliver – and that may be an issue for one rapidly growing branch of business, Islamic finance. Thomson Reuters is already worried about lack of transparency in Islamic Sukuk products, and a few countries are also concerned about moves by some Arab nations to try to impose tighter regulation on the internet generally – as our next article warns.

Data protection, corporate use of social media and, indeed, actual ownership of corporate communications are yet further regulatory issues appearing on the horizon and featured in our penultimate article. Yet, as a recent Business Information Industry Association survey has revealed, information professionals don’t usually feature in the list of high value service providers who can help satisfy these compliance needs.

Info Pros Critical to Compliance Success

So our last contribution offers six strategies that information managers can deploy to improve their organisation's compliance record. Author Edsel David, a knowledge management specialist at services company Sodexo, makes the point that many compliance requirements are common across all industries – so information managers should be able to address them in a standard, systematic way.

Info pros can also take ownership of much compliance activity, Edsel implies. They can develop strategies, train people in and reinforce policies (repeatedly), can inventory information assets, control access and adopt a strategic approach to document retention and archiving.

So as this selection of contributions shows, the opportunities for information professionals to participate in the “must have” business activity of compliance are legion. But it may require some reskilling – and some profile raising too.

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