This would be doable if compliance were all that ever changed, but most operations have product, market, technology and business changes happening concurrently.
Once documents and training are current, personnel often change anyway. I spoke with one health and safety manager in a diverse enterprise with 106 employees who had 75 different regulations to track. He said: "It would be nice if they [regulators] talked to each other."
Thankfully, all kinds of clever businesses are now offering update services, packages and cloud-based management systems for their compliance niche.
They can do this profitably because they've intelligently examined the task, specialised their expertise to it – and because they're using current information management technology.
Call me an optimist, but I think Aotearoa New Zealand is small enough to use similar information management techniques on a national scale, and we should.
For example, imagine if Standards New Zealand adopted and developed a structured authoring standard designed for fast and automatic publishing to multiple formats simultaneously.
Instead of having to market and sell updates of individual regulations to cover its costs, Standards New Zealand could charge a subscription fee for automatic updates that would promulgate themselves through the content management systems of subscribers.
Take for example, the vocational education institutions mentioned earlier. These would be blessed with knowing whenever their compliance content had to change and how it had to change.
They could trigger updates within their documentation, watch them happen, and meanwhile consider whether they had to update teaching and assessment to accommodate the changes.
Standards New Zealand would be released from the unenviable task of selling new issues to cover costs and instead could charge for a valued service that offered genuine savings to subscribers. (Furthermore, cost savings from leaner communication of regulations would sit within Standards New Zealand, creating a good incentive for economy all round.)
I've looked at compliance because I believe we can achieve worthwhile efficiencies in this area – privately held businesses are.
What I like about this vision is that doing compliance smarter at national level would free resources throughout industry and these resources could be applied to better develop and curate knowledge and expertise.
Would you prefer to live in an economy with enterprise-level compliance updates – or an economy that did smarter compliance updates nationally, enabling industries to devote more resource to developing people's capability? I like to think that more capable people need less regulation to achieve the same policy goals, but that's up to us all as citizens to demonstrate as we create our future.
Employers also need to be confident that their employees bring to their tasks the right expertise and industry knowledge to safely and effectively perform the work and to make sound decisions while on the job.
Brigit Manning is a freelance technical and business writer in Hastings.
