Time, is waiting in the wings, it speaks of senseless things. Its pawns are you and me.....

The title of this short post is a David Bowie lyric. From back when David Bowie's lyrics were every bit as symbolistic (?) as say, Bob Dylans....

...But I digress and I have not even started.

When all the smoke clears I think I will conclude that my entire career has been devoted to better understanding of TIME. How to model it. What it means. How to build systems that understand it.

In coming posts, I will be coming back to it again and again but for now, let me start with this.

Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) is now an established acronym for an information management discipline in which the concept of TIME (and its co-joined twin) CHANGE, are central.

There is now a Tech Center in Ireland devoted to it : GRCTC and I am involved in it personally on behalf of Propylon.

Many other words get dragged in here too. Concepts like digital permanence, authenticity, provenance, audit trails, change markup, semantic deltas...

Some of these I have touched on here in the past, some not.

I think maybe I will start with blockchains as they are quite topical at the moment and I think blockchains is one of the first really interesting things to come along in the area of authenticity/provenance since the concept of Public Key Cryptography.