Russell Beattie Notebook ? RealNames Next

Russell Beattie Notebook ? RealNames Next

It's strange how I was thinking of the same thing this morning - when I saw my wife keying in full url's like www.webmd.com. And I was reminded of the Realnames concept from a few years back too. That made me wonder as to why this never took off.

But then I thought some more and I noticed my own usage of the web browser - strangely I observed that in most cases I was just putting in the descriptive word for a website or company that I wanted to visit and the google address bar search combined with the setting to take me to the most appropriate result did the rest (you can do the same by configuring your browser address field to use Yahoo search or MSN search and it will take you to the most appropriate result). Now granted that sometimes it doesn't take you to the right website, however the same issues would be there with Realnames also. As it is, in USA there are companies with same names registered in different states. How will you decide who gets to register the name? What about all the other companies with the same name? How about the international stuff - when the web started, US was way ahead and everyone accepted that US based ICANN will administed the .com domain. How are you going to get every country in the world to accept such a scheme at this time - when the growth of internet is much faster in other countries.

My suggestion is that you let Google and other search providers to worry about taking you to the best match - no need to reinvent the wheel.

Compliance, SOXA and BPM

BPM (Business Process Management) suites are providing a whole new way of building applications that enable companies to clearly define their risk management strategy, identify risk mitigation processes and checks and balances, define and deploy organizational processes to monitor the performance against these and provide a high level Risk Management and Compliance Score Card Dashboard to the senior management.

Recently, a lot of BPM suites vendors have come out with such solutions. Some have even tied up with Risk Management consulting companies (e.g., Stellent and Protiviti).

However, my company - Newgen Software - has a new offering that puts a different twist on this solution. Newgen has been building its products and solutions in India, where the Indian government is increasingly following the US lead in areas like corporate governance. Modeled on the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOXA), the revised Clause 49 in India was introduced last year and companies have till this December to comply. Newgen has been working with several Business India 500 (equivalent to the Fortune 500) companies in India and also with the Big 4 consulting companies - and their compliance and auditing practices. Recently, we introduced our Compliance Management framework - based on our BPM platform in the US market. You can view the full press release at the AIIM web site (The Content Management and BPM industry association):

http://aiim.org/article-pr.asp?ID=30667

I am looking forward to suggestions from the BPM community - specially opinion leaders writing blogs and practitioners who are leading such initiatives in their companies - as to how we can help them in implementing compliance management solutions using BPM technology. You can respond to me at my email address sanjay [at] newgen [dot] net.