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.’  With more applications going online into the SaaS world, I don’t see the justification for keeping paper copies of everything we do. Perhaps now is the time for business to dust off those old document management strategy papers and re-evaluate the need for printers, the paper and ink they consume.

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

What’s going on in both cases is that sub-groups of the general community have captured these niches and are now using Wikipedia as a marketing tool for their viewpoints - and while that’s expected and reasonable for agenda sites like groklaw or dailykos, it’s fundamentally inappropriate in a site nominally dedicated to the provision of objective information.

As many readers will know, if you do a Google search on a particular topic, the chances are high that a Wikipedia entry will be close to or at the top of the list. If by clicking on a Wikipedia link, you are directed to fundamentally distorted information, then Paul’s assertion has reasonable foundation. Hardly the wisdom of crowds that Wikipedia promises. Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins thinks Murphy’s argument - or rather its extension to suggest the collapse of democracy via social media is disingenuous:

Modern democracy, at least in the form practiced commonly on websites like Wikipedia tend to include what can basically be likened to ’super-delegates.’ There’s editors in charge that will often over-rule the concensus opinion as well as roving mobs will look for articles created by large communities with little influence within the ecosystem of Wikipedia who will exert their sway to remove documentation (the entire tree of RantMedia and Sean Kennedy related articles were subject to this effect a year or two ago). This social structure Peter-MacIntosh-Geisha-Expert is more akin to something slightly more organized than anarchy (tribalism, perhaps). In any event, this isn’t pandemic to all social media and democraticly crowd-sourced websites.

I don’t think Mark’s argument stands up to scrutiny. As mentor in SAP’s community and as one of the early (and most vocal) members of the Irregulars, I know for myself how small groups and individuals can wield power out of all proportion to their number. Sometimes their thoughts and actions are plain wrong. I also know that individual blog entries can have consequences far beyond their original intent.

The truly worrying thing is that we seem to be substituting objective thinking for whatever we find on the Internet. I’m pretty sure that’s true for the current generation of teenagers who’ve known little else except Google and who, through no fault of their own, will be drawn naturally to Wikipedia. That is because of the ranking weight Google’s algorithms apply to Wikipedia entries. To me, it is a commercial form of mutual masturbation driven by AdWords and an obsession with page views. It is ironic for instance that when typing in ‘wisdom of crowds’ into the Firefox 3 address bar that the Wikipedia entry was served up to me.

As Andrew Keen has consistently warned, we will be left with truthiness and not truth. I am one of the few bloggers I know who believes there is a great deal to be considered in what Andrew says. His latest article, which pokes fun at Tim O’Reilly, the person who foisted Web 2.0 on the rest of us makes the point that:

And if you really want to read about O’Reilly, then read his novels. There’s an appropriately long entry on Web 2.0 — O’Reilly’s latest and greatest work of fiction.

Keen is of course speaking ironically and in his own words, he remains a professional (if incredibly articulate) troublemaker. But people believe what they read on the Internet, often without fact checking for themselves. (sic) Today, it is all about opinion with little attention to the detailed underpinnings of fact that are necessary to make sense of what is being read.

Is it any wonder then that in a world where the rules have failed us, that in the US at least, there is a call to reconsider the implications of applying value judgment under FAS157 for compliance purposes? Putting aside the collective squeals emanating from Wall Street that forms the basis for this particular siren call, we simply don’t have the people sufficiently grounded in understanding the technologies that deliver information. And it is only likely to get worse before it gets better.

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’t.

And while we’re at it, it’s worth mentioning SAP. Its community of more than 1.5 million code heads and business process experts creates blog posts and wiki content at a phenomenal rate. Each piece of individual activity on the SAP Community attracts a certain number of points. This year those points are going towards a specific target. When the number of points earned reaches 2.5 million, SAP will donate €100,000 to the UN World Food Programme. The more points, the more money given. If the total reaches 3.5 million points then SAP will give €200,000. Apart from being a laudable objective, the knowledge created inside the SAP community is an invluable resource to those looking for help across a broad range of topics.

Disclosure: I am a mentor in the SAP community. It is a pro bono engagement. I create some content for SAP’s BPX community on a paid basis.