The Financial Crisis of 2008 and SaaS Based eCompliance

Over the next few weeks, as we all try to digest all of the information and subsequent analysis about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, I am planning to investigate the various Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based eCompliance and eGoverance solutions and what impact they can have on diverting future problems in the financial markets.

Is more government oversight and regulation the answer? "After Monday's Wall Street meltdown, businesses are likely to face increasing compliance scrutiny, " stated John Bace, research vice president of Gartner IT Management Group, in a recent keynote address at the Midsize Enterprise Summit in Grapevine, Texas. "The shadow of yesterday [Monday] will be longer than Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, or any other regulation of modern times," Bace told a crowd of about 300 CIOs.

And can SaaS based solutions with the ability to enable centralized, nearly real time and very granular information management be the right technology at the right time? As an example, would simple SaaS based email archiving technology coupled with a rules based search engine to identify internal discussions about pending insolvencies or short sale tips be valuable in the quest to avert the next crisis? As stated, over the next couple of weeks, I plan to investigate this and report my finding on this Blog.

As such, any input from any of the current SaaS based eCompliance and eGoverance providers would be greatly appreciated.