Regulatory Compliance Nightmare (Score 2, Interesting)

It seems to me this is an increasingly common and distressing phenomenon, and I'm convinced that it's driven largely by the dramatic increase in regulatory compliance concerns. Case in point: in 2002, I collaborated with one person for two weeks and redesigned our company's website. I work in the marketing department, but I had a little bit of web design experience; my coworker is more of a hacker type who doesn't really have a title, but he's in I.T. We got the job done, great. Now, almost four years later, I'm still getting requests to make website updates, a procedure which has turned into an eight-headed monster due to the slew of 'systems' which have been put in place to regulate our public website content. This means that making a single, minor textual edit means filling out a Request for Testing form, logging into a semi-automated online QA application and submitting a second request for testing, making the change and updating the CVS repository in staging (which, incidentally, took me a year and a half to be granted access to, since I'm not 'officially' an IT guy), then sending a follow-up e-mail detailing exactly what was changed and listing all of the files affected. To top it off, we'd used a popular WYSIWYG HTML editor when we originally designed the site, and we opted to utilize all the cool automated site design features contained in the software. This resulted in a forest of static .htm pages (see, I knew little or nothing about server-side scripting way back then) with a ton of duplicated code. Needless to say, all of those automated features got tossed out the window a long time ago. Adding server side scripting is not an option, since all the pages would have to be renamed, links rewritten... which is straying from the point- which is, I.T. departments are running scared. Litigation is everywhere. Keeping things stable has become the sole priority in any company under any sort of scrutiny, since the stakes are higher than ever before. Nobody wants to pay fines or do jail time. Suddenly, the free for all has turned into a mine field. This is all the more reason that startups are likelier to gain traction in the marketplace. Agility is the key word- and it has been destroyed in all but a few larger organizations. If it's any consolation, you're not alone.