Don’t despair now that Pete the Freak, Jodie, Barrymore and Gorgeous George are off our screens, the denouement of the Enron scandal should have enough to keep us appalled in grim fascination for the next few months.

Artfully constructed transvestites and purring politicians may be missing but the epithets “disgraced” and “former” will be in popular usage now that the trial is underway. Like a lot of contestants in that other house of pain, the key figures will become notorious.

Enron, of course, has passed beyond news story and into business lore. Even in the UK, where the company was largely unknown outside the energy industry, it has become an icon in negative, a badge to be forever associated with that great growth phrase of the last few years, corporate governance. Like Aesop’s fox and sour grapes, Enron is not just narrative but moral fable.

It offered a soapbox for George W Bush to pronounce on business and ethics. And so the Republican party that always prided itself on less government, brought in the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and plenty of red tape.

This being America, Sarbanes-Oxley had a knock-on effect globally. It directly affected subsidiaries and companies reporting to the US markets but it was also used as a yardstick for other compliance-related legislation. As with other familiars, Sarbanes-Oxley became so much a part of our lives that it even earned its own diminutives. SOX, Sarbox, call it what you will, you can never leave it or lose it again.

I am sceptical about the big IT sell surrounding SOX rules, however. Coming as they did at the trough of the post-internet boom economy, suppliers grabbed at the new rules and used them to put the fear of god into buyers. If you were in the business of selling storage, servers or any form of document archiving kit, this was birthdays and Christmases all at once.

Pretty soon it had become an article of accepted boardroom wisdom that if you weren’t investing in tin and code to archive your business communications then you could wind up in jail. Responsibility for executing this belt-and-braces strategy went direct to the IT department and for once budget concerns were overridden.

What is perhaps remarkable is that in many subsequent cases, key documents were still not found, even when companies had spent heavily on what was seen as the requisite equipment. Tagging of data remains in its infancy and the lesson is being learned that too much archiving and not enough thought is an insufficient kludge.

We’ll soon know whether a smoking gun can be found in the pockets of Enron’s leaders but it already seems likely that the most significant evidence in the case will be verbal rather than electronic. Enron hoodwinked everybody through a highly complex organisational structure that was only revealed by insiders, rather than the work of digital detectives.

Archiving and document management are all very well but they don’t exist in a vacuum and they’re not pixie dust that makes corporate malfeasance go away.