Compliance 1: Forgetting Lessons of the Industrial Revolution

(Note: Since this was written in 2002, we've seen the advent of automated certification management systems. But the final output is still a linear text document, intended for people to read and sign-off on. That's still a weak point in the system.)
To Simplify Compliance: Certify the Content, not the Document. What's that mean? Pharmaceutical Information expert Paul Mattise says, "Certify the SOP, signatures only on the deliverable, not on the process." That's making people do with their sore, tired eyeballs what machines should do by design. Instead, reduce the workload and accelerate the process. Eliminate the source of much of the confusion: Drop the documents entirely, certify the factlets/objects and data package they're in.

The knowledge that we transmit in the vast majority of our written business documents is not nearly as tacit--i.e., as creative, unique, or expressive-- as we'd like to think it is. We are trying to use the unstructured, fuzzy, subjective tool of language to represent, badly, an underlying reality that is essentially objective, and modularly, hierarchically structured. We need to separate the factual representation from the narrative. Images, tables, lists, and standardized language--i.e., "meaning objects," or jargon--will help us to overcome the quagmire of misunderstandings in which we often find ourselves.
Have we forgotten all we learned from the Industrial Revolution, besides how to control abuse and corruption? We can create standard visual frameworks for document structures (format, styles, breaks, fonts, etc.) Then we can store and manipulate the content as XML, and put the e-signatures on that. Treat it as the data it is, and stop trying to make it literature.