As a Social Historian I love to look at the Past and draw parallels with what is transpiring here in the Present. One of the times in History which fascinates me is the Prohibition Era (1920-1933 officially) – in reality the consequences of these laws are still felt today. The “dries” vs the “wets” and the most notorious "wets" was Al Capone in Chicago. The Volstead Act which came to life because of the social ills (primarily blamed on alcoholism) existing in the USA aimed to prevent the spread of these social ills was passed to enforce the ban on the sale, distribution etc of alcoholic beverages. Al Capone famously said: " Prohibition (this law) has made nothing but trouble".
In our Procurement world we too had a similar preventative Act (Sarbanes Oxley 2002) aimed at codifying the behaviours of Publicly owned Corporations. This Act came about as a result of the Enron and Worldcom financial scandals. In recent memory we have the Banking Scandal.
What we learn from this is that government pass laws as a reaction to some behavior in organisations and society. The Acts all aim to prevent similar actions from happening in the future and to protect the wider society from unscrupulous/harmful activities.
One potentially harmful activity I have observed was in a global organisation where no Procurement Procedures existed. The organisation purchased and installed software which interacts with its customer data and the supplier of the software had not been properly vetted nor had the software been put through tests to establish that it will not be harmful to the organisation and its customers. Luckily we caught the issue early and were able to mitigate some of the risks, but we are sure that millions of these transactions are happening every day which could put your organisations longevity at risk.
Debate and Vote: a) You agree that we need organisations to implement Procurement Rules governing how it does business with third parties i.e. "Dry" and that not all laws cause trouble? Or b) Let business gets on with it - if it is not broken, why fix it i.e. "Wets"?
Thank you for reading. I would appreciate your Comments/Debate and please Vote by either typing a) or b) in the Comment box below. I shall publish the Vote results next week Wednesday. Thank you for your time. Sid
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