Trade Compliance IT Strategy

Hi
I have spent many years working in Strategic, Tactical and Operational roles in Trade Compliance IT. The interesting part is my previous jobs have need me to play all three roles. I attribute this to the low number of people with TC IT skills. Of late I have started becoming pretty tired of the operational (including production support) and the lower level tactical tasks. I strongly believe it's time for me to focus on a Strategic role. While I haven't found my dream job :0) I do want to put out my thoughts on TC IT strategy and prepare for it.

My approach to TC IT strategy is very simple.

Step 1: Start grouping your needs into buckets. Each bucket must be an aggregation of similar needs. For example, HS and ECCN classification would be in the same bucket.

Step 2: Break out your needs into short term, medium term and long term needs.

Step 3: Determine what functionality will help you meet your needs. Some areas to keep in mind are security, auditability and ease of use. There are many more.

Step 4: Determine ballpark transaction volumes for your needs. For example, you want to do ECCN classification. Then you may want to estimate how many sku's/products will need to be classified/reclassified in the next 1,5 and 10 years.

Step 4: Determine the solution that fits the needs in steps 3 and 4 in the short and medium run and can scale to the long term needs. Once you think of the solution this way you will not lose sight of scalability needs/requirements.

While looking at a solution there are some other factors that you need to keep in the back of your mind like Total Cost of Ownership, vendor stability/longevity, vendor partnership, software and master data quality.

Let me know your thoughts on other areas that I need to consider to come up with a good TC IT strategy. Let me also know if you have a TC IT strategist in your organization who works on long term solutions.

Cheers

Global Trade IT Strategy anyone?

Hi

The article in supply chain digest titled "Global Logistics News: Technology Enablement in Global Logistics and Trade Management Remains Well Behind Growth in Global Sourcing" touched a raw nerve:

http://www.scdigest.com/assets/On_Target/08-08-20-1.php?cid=1865

The article talks about how IT initiative in Global Trade are reactionary. I entirely agree. I would be surprised if the approach changes. Why? Here are some reasons:

a) IT is considered as a cost center and isn't considered a strategic partner. Trade Compliance/Global Trade IT gets lumped into the same bucket. Often operations/business folks want to control IT strategy. I think it needs to be a partnership.

b) There aren't enough Global Trade/Trade Compliance IT professionals around to provide the right kind of vision and direction. Global Trade IT is a relatively new area. The number of professionals with the right knowledge and skills to work on a roadmap is limited. Even if they have the vision they may be constrained by my comment in a).

Let's hope company's start taking Global Trade IT initiatives more seriously and start getting the right IT people together to work on roadmaps.

Cheers