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Apoorv Durga

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Cricket, Lies, and....Content Management

28-Apr-2010

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Asia-Pacific Marketplace, E-Discovery, Governance

They say nothing unites us Indians more than Cricket. Mash that up with Bollywood, big money, politics, as well as sleaze, and you get the multi-billion dollar Indian Premier League (IPL) -- an irony given that India is a land of Mahatama Gandhi.

The last few weeks has seen a drama, albeit not a Bollywood one, unfold. It all started when the IPL chairman cum commissioner Mr. Modi fired the first salvo on Twitter about a new IPL franchise which was being "mentored" by a ruling party MP. The MP, Mr.Tharoor, quickly tweeted back to start a scandal now being called by various names such as IPL-Gate, Modi-Gate, and Tharoor-Gate. An alert media was quick to latch onto it and generate breaking news, eventually revealing much more than the shenanigans of Modi and Tharoor.

We next saw the two protagonists leaving their coveted positions: Tharoor resigning on an emotional note in the Parliament and Modi being suspended -- ironically via e-mail -- by IPL's governing council.

This is certainly good news for Twitter: people in India who have no clue of the web now want to tweet. But what has this got to do with Content Management?

Well, the IPL scandal that's rocking the Indian Parliament and cricketing world revolves essentially around the issue of compliance. Let us examine how many of the problems could have been avoided had the IPL followed good compliance practices.

And what constitutes good compliance practices? We offer a short online course that lays them out. Let's review some important compliance considerations in the context of this scandal:

1. Executive sponsorship: IPL is a sub-committee of Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). On the face of it, IPL had it's own CEO, Chairman, as well as a Governing Council (GC) of 12 members. So it appears there was a suitable level of top management support. However, it now turns out that the CEO was just a figurehead with most of the decisions being taken by a proxy. The BCCI and the GC assumed that the CEO would do his job and were caught wrong-footed.
2. Well defined governance procedures: Okay, so they created a governing council (GC). The GC boasts eminent members, including well respected cricketers, politicians, and administrators -- but all without any accountability. And just like the CEO, the GC remained a silent spectator to all the wrongdoing, never consulted on important matters. In fact, the GC members remained unaware of major transactions involving billions of dollars, since all of these were handled by just one single person. No procedures existed to ensure the placement of suitable checks and balances.
3. Identified (and prioritized) compliance requirements: What's that? Since everyone involved was making big money, no one in their wildest dreams thought they'd need to comply with legal and ethical rules. The current scandal have revealed (among other things): inconsistencies in shareholding patterns, bid and contract documents gone missing, and some suspect funding sources. No processes were defined to approve contract documents or to keep an audit trail of transactions.
4. Ability to manage change as a result new business processes: Processes were non-existent and every activity was handled in an ad-hoc manner, depending on whims and fancies of individuals.
5. Systems to monitor, audit, and enforce compliance: There were no systems and more importantly no desire to enforce compliance. Everyone was in for the love of money, not for the love of the game
6. Right tools – such as those for managing content and records – to optimize your compliance efforts: The parent body, BCCI is the richest sports body in India and also the richest cricket board in the world. One would assume that a cash-rich cricket board would invest in technology that would help them in managing records and documents, enabling processes for tracking bids and contracts and other dealings. Yet, the BCCI doesn't even have a decent web presence. Use of technology could have facilitated transparency, something they evidently wanted to avoid.

Will applying proper Content Management practices and following the steps above in and of themselves enable organizations to avoid tax evasion, illegal betting, bribes, suspect shareholding patterns and so forth? Of course not. If you have people of questionable integrity and ethics running an organization, no amount of management practices will help.

Nevertheless, technology can help uncover and document misdeeds. If IPL had followed basic compliance principles, things would not have gotten so far out of hand. And we would have enjoyed our greatest passions - cricket and bollywood -- even more.

(Special thanks to Siddharth Gongala for supplying background info. Sid is a Sports Producer for an online channel.)