Legal, Compliance and other monsters

"What do you call 5000 dead lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start! "

I remember a hilarious set of meeting minutes from my consultancy period, where a junior analyst from the client literally cited an executive who described the Compliance dept. as a 'multiheaded monster'. The minutes were sent out without review to all parties including...the Compliance dept. - who dryly responded in their review comments that "compliance does not like to be called a multiheaded monster". Hilarious.

I also remember having stretched the patience of a stamp-collecting Englishman named John (a buff MF btw) and a Belgian consultant named Jean-Francois (also a buff MF, looked like a boxer). Back in the days, we forced these two characters to sort out some legal and compliance issues related to the processing of customer data before we started our job (which was migration of data between crossborder systems).

Well, today I saw a document of a young lion that started at our company's Compliance dept, basically trashing the data strategy that is being implemented our set of CRM intiatives. I didn't meet the guy, but he is already stretching my patience. So I took a deep breath, said that I will blog the experience (which I'm doing now), and that I will try to remember John's way - fight fire with fire (Aidan and Jason - in the end the guy brought about something positive - imagine that !) - LOL.

Here's to John Biermann - on St Paddy's day.