In recent times, SAP has been woo’ing me down the governance, risk and compliance (GRC) path. To its credit, the company has done a lot of good work in this area, seeking to develop industry alliances and raise awareness of the issues at stake, especially in the area of corporate citizenship. Most recently, James Farrar, who is VP corporate citizenship at SAP and Steve Rochlin, head of Accountability US managed to get a good article on the topic as it relates to Web 2.0 placed at the FT. Among other things, they say:

A decade ago if you brought together a company, an activist non-governmental organisation (NGO), and a government agency, you were guaranteed to create tension. Today, these oddly matched partners generate innovation out of positive, creative tension. Web 2.0 platforms make it easier to build such diverse communities that use different experience and perspective to create innovative solutions.

A couple of days ago, I received an SAP email newletter with the tantalizing headline:
Achieving Corporate Accountability with a Unified Approach to Governance, Risk, and Compliance Webcast. On the webcast David Kasabian, analyst with AMR reckons the market is worth $32 billion per annum. That makes it a good sized market. Holly Roland, VP marketing for GRC solutions at SAP talked extensively about managing the risks in the supply chain - something I’ve talked about elsewhere.

Imagine then my surprise when a June 2008 report from Gartner entitled Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance landed on my digital doorstep that doesn’t list SAP. The company doesn’t appear anywhere although one of its partners, Protiviti does. Marketing ahead of reality, an unfortunate omission or something else? SAP has reached some 1,700 customers with GRC solutions and seen revenues double over the last year.

[Image credit: Gartner Inc.]

PS: I expect to hear a lot more about how the BusinessObjects acquisition is feeding into SAP’s GRC efforts at the forthcoming influencer’s meeting in Boston next month.

I haven’t used a printer from more than three years. Part of that is because I’ve been conducting an experiment to see if I can ‘live in the cloud,’ part of it is because almost everything I do is digital in nature. The only time I really need to print something is when an organization insists on a faxed copy of a document and even that’s becoming quite rare. On those occasions, I drive 20 miles to the nearest place I know where there is a fax machine and make a day of it. It’s not efficient and hardly good use of increasingly scarce hydro-carbons but a good reminder that not everyone has jumped into the digital age.

Even so, I took a sharp intake of breath when I saw a post from my old chum Vinnie Mirchandani, setting out ways by which companies could mitigate their use of ink cartidges. At an alleged $8,000 a gallon, that’s a heck of a price to pay for the pleasure of holding a piece of paper. And that’s before we consider the costs asssociated with manufacturing the catridges and the toxins they produce.

I remember many years ago, Bill Gates saying that Microsoft would become paperless and yet today by all accounts, it uses more paper than ever. In my case it was a conscious decision to ‘just say no.’

Paul Murphy calls foul on the practices conducted by some Wikipedia editors, claiming that in respect of certain topic areas:

What

Last week’s launch of the iPhone seemed to get everyone excited to the point where queues formed early at many stores that quickly ran out of stock. What if you are an early adopter and already had a first generation model? Give it to a sibling? Dump it? What do you do with old cell phones anyway?

Here’s something you could think of doing, courtesy of Suw Charman: donate to your local Oxfam shop. Apart from being a socially repsonsible thing to do, it means that money raised via Oxfam goes to good causes. Another alternative suggested by an AMR analyst is to donate to local battered wives homes. All cell phones can call emergency services so this is a way where your riches can directly benefit those less fortunate.

While on the topic of good causes, my good friend Thomas Otter, ex-SAP and now with Gartner is planning to spend a week in August putting himself through what to me seems like an excruciating amount of pain in an effort to raise money for the Zimbabwe Benefit Foundation. Modern technology allows anyone to donate painlessly. This is one cause I thoroughly recommend. As I said elsewhere:

The pain he will be putting himself is as nothing compared to the pain of those he is supporting. He gets to choose. They don