> However, when describing and managing our company, we resort to digital paper and tidbits of info distributed across people in the building.

The perception that ISO/IEC 27001:2022 is simply an exercise in document creation and curation is frustrating. It is not, but an auditor cannot be in your company for a year or three, so the result is the next best thing: your auditor looks at written evidence, with things like timestamps, resumes, meeting minutes, agendas, and calendars, and concludes that based on the evidence that you are doing the things you said you're doing in your evidence reviews and interviews.

The consequence if you are not doing these things happens if you get sued, if you get yelled at by the French data protection regulator, or if you go bankrupt due to a security incident you didn't learn from, and your customers are breathing down your neck.

All of the documentation in the world doesn't mean you actually do the things you write down, but we have to be practical: until you consider these things, you aren't aware of them. You can read the standard and just do the best practices, and you'll be fine. The catch is that if you want the piece of paper, you go to an auditor, and people buy things because that paper means that there is now an accountability trail and people theoretically get in trouble if that turns out to be false.

It's like the whole problem with smart contracts is that you can't actually tether them to real world outcomes where the smart aspect falls apart (like relying on some external oracle to tell the contract what to do). Your customers care about ISO because your auditor was accredited by a body like ANAB to audit you correctly, and that reduces the risk of you botching some information security practice. This means that their data is in theory, more safe. And if it isn't, there is a lawsuit on the other end if things go awry.