Compliance in a Digital World

written by Roel van Rijsewijk on May 7, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Tags: compliance, digital dilemma, digital world

Today in western societies more people are employed collecting, handling and distributing information than in any other occupation. Millions of computers inhabit the earth and many millions of miles of optical fibre, wire and air waves link people, their computers and the vast array of information handling devices together. Our society is truly an information society, our time an information age.

Information forms the intellectual capital from which human beings craft their lives and the basis on which organizations operate. However, the building of intellectual capital is vulnerable in many ways. For example, intellectual capital is impaired whenever you lose personal information without being compensated for it, when you are precluded access to information which is of value to you, when you have revealed information you hold intimate, or when you find out that the information upon which your very existence depends is in error. These are the ethical issues around digital information and the information age must deal with these threats to society.

How we deal with the ethical issues around digital information is now for a large part determined by companies in the Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) industry. The internet is sometimes heralded as a free-for-all and non-governed place for human interaction which, according to some, is the way it should stay. Some regulation and oversight of corporations in the TMT industry is however needed to protect people against information bankruptcy or desolation. Compliance is often associated with the financial industry. It was the stock market crash in 1929 that lead to an acceleration of regulation and oversight of financial markets and financial institutions in what was then also called a new era. As a result of this crisis and many more debacles that followed, the financial industry is now one of the most regulated and governed in the world.

The moral imperative is clear. Maybe we have to wait until a disaster happens or until companies misuse our trust in them, but eventually we will have to ensure that information technology, and the information it handles, are used to enhance society. In this light, one can predict that sooner or later, the TMT industry will be as regulated as the Financial Services industry, leading to a new demand for compliance specialists.

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