* Does legislation stifle innovation?
The longer we’re involved with this industry, the clearer it becomes that legislation – while it is often well-intentioned – often comes into direct or indirect conflict with technology innovation.
Going back a few years, in the early days of frame relay and ATM networking, there were serious questions as to whether U.S.-based service providers could provide internetworking between these two services because doing so would provide a form of “protocol conversion,” which was prohibited for some time immediately following the 1984 divestiture of AT&T. (The reasoning here – to the extent to which reasoning and legislation are not intrinsically oxymoronic – was that the phone companies could not provide “data processing,” and protocol was a form of “data processing.”) More recently, similar issues have been raised – and continue to exist for questions like the extent to which VoIP service providers provide E-911 services.
In response to the publication of the 2005-2006 Webtorials State-of-the-Market Report, in which unified messaging was identified as a major application that would provide significant benefits, Steve received an interesting bit of feedback from a reader. In particular, the reader wrote, “When I showed UM [unified messaging] to our compliance folks they flat out refused to let me implement. I know from talking to my peers that other financial institutions are either canceling plans or backing out UM for the same reason. Was any of this reflected in your survey?”
The short answer is that it was not reflected in the survey because the question was not asked. But it’s a great question, and, once again, it presents an innovation/legislation conundrum. In spite of all of the great legislative intent ranging from HIPAA to Sarbanes-Oxley, the result is that implementers of new technology can unwillingly run afoul of legislation – especially in financial and medical areas.
So we’ll throw the question back to you. Where have you seen legal roadblocks to effective technology implementation? Are we once again in danger of making systems and processes less effective because of legislation that blocks the efficient use of technology?
Please join in this discussion at a Webtorials forum, and we’ll summarize the results in a future newsletter.
