Towards a lean-government using new IT-architectures for compliance monitoring

Recent turmoil in financial markets has invoked governments to monitor activities and transactions in the private sector more strictly. At the same time, policy makers strive to cut back on government spending by reducing the size of government agencies. These contradicting developments require governments to become leaner, meaning that more (new) tasks can be performed with fewer resources. In order to achieve these goals, we see a transformation from paper-based business-to-government information exchange to IT-enabled compliance architectures. However, the shape of these architectures is not yet clear, as are the challenges that come with a specific architecture design. The objective of this paper is to specify the dimensions of IT-enabled compliance architectures and the challenges that rise when transforming to such architectures. Drawing on dimensions described in literature, this paper compares two new compliance architectures, one in the meat processing industry and one in financial reporting. Findings indicate that compliance architectures require different choices regarding the frequency of reporting, the style of control, the formation of regulation, the type of dependencies, the auditing base and the way the underlying infrastructure accommodates business-to-government information exchange. This paper shows that while the transformation to IT-enabled compliance monitoring helps realize a lean-government, the design of the underlying architectures is subject to several, sector specific conditions, including established laws and regulations.