Compliance-driven software
At Regsoft, we've been building software for over 30 years, studying and following the best practices. One of the most profound shifts in software engineering can be summed up by saying, 'the more painful something is, the more often you should do it.'
The classic example of software development pain involves releasing a new version of your website on a Friday afternoon. The reasoning is straight-forward: you're more likely to be rushing to finish the release, and if (or, more likely, when) there are problems, they will surface on the weekend when you are hopefully not scheduled to be in the office.
The seemingly sensible response would be to reduce the number of releases to reduce the amount of risk. You could then invest significant time in planning and preparation for those releases. And with enough planning and preparation, the releases should proceed smoothly, right?
As I'm sure you can imagine, there are several problems with this approach. The most significant drawback is that each release represents the largest possible change to the system, maximising the chances of failure. Additionally, you don't gain any benefit from code that is ready early in the cycle, queued up and waiting for the release.
What has been shown to be most effective is to do the most painful thing, as often as possible. This approach works because you are forced to address the issues that cause the discomfort in the first place. In our example of releasing a website to production, you have to address how long it takes to perform a release, and how risky it is that the new version will break.
For software development, this means automating the release process, so that a single button press can perform all of the steps to release your current website. The other necessary precondition is that your deployment steps must contain sufficient testing that you, as an organisation, are confident that if all of the tests pass that the code is ready to be deployed.
Would an audit by a regulator cause pain?
When was the last time your company verified that it is paying its employees correctly? How sure is it about its accounting? Are you confident that it is obeying all local, state and federal statutes that apply to it?
Most of us try do our best to be compliant with the regulations we know about and either hope or assume that we have 'done enough'.
At Regsoft, we believe that there is a better way.
Our software is built with the premise that every business decision should be tested and verified to be compliant with all regulatory and business obligations.
To enable frequent, no-fear compliance validations, we believe that our software must be convenient, secure and unobtrusive to your business operations.
Compliance as business logic
We have found is that the data required to prove compliance is the most often the same data that is needed to implement business logic and processes. And, for any activity that has requirements beyond regulation, our system lets you implement custom data fields and logic to augment the standard regulatory requirements.
We have taken this a step further, however. Our philosophy is that demonstrable compliance should be the number one priority for business systems, since the marginal cost can be so low. With compliance as the bedrock, the hard work of process and software is done. The remaining effort for business is fit-for-purpose customisation, leaving user-experience to become the centre of attention.
By starting with the regulation, we get the assurances of maintaining traceable compliance as the base level starting point. Effort can then be best spent on differentiation.
So why don't you give us a call and see if compliance-driven software is right for you?