IIM warns of compliance concerns close to home
IIM warns of compliance concerns close to home
The Institute for Information Management has spelt out its compliance concerns at its Annual General Meeting held this week in Sydney, following the recent release of the Sarbanes Oxley-Act powers.
Linda Shave, a consultant with over 20 years of experience in consulting and providing business solutions in the areas of information technology, workflow, document and records management in public and private domains in Australia and overseas, said that companies here would feel the impact soon.
"Businesses are becoming bigger and bigger, which means there are too many processes to manage. This creates gaps in knowledge, which can be extremely dangerous, especially when financial transactions are involved.
"Also, there is fragmentation, because people moves jobs and nobody knows how to do the work that person used to do. Organisations don't always know if they have the right person following compliance regulations according to the rule books."
She said that workflow routines have to be managed properly, as well as the control of paper records. She has visited organisations in the past, and looked at the way different departments are run, such as include HR, finance, the IT department and the legal department. She believes that all these different departments understand the culture of compliance so that follow the processes through at every level and remain integrated.
"When a transaction is made, all parties need to know where to find that record so that they don't need to get worried about it being lost, or kept somewhere insecure, which could cause problems when they need to retrieve it at a later date.
"We need a communication strategy within the culture of compliance to cope with responsibilities around records and information management. Wherever you are in the business, their needs to be a solid concept for retaining key information."
She said that the government has more stringent rules, than commercial companies, around IT management, content management, web content, version control and making sure that documents are protected, accurate and preserved.
Shave believes that commercial companies need to follow the guidelines of the government to ensure that they are best to equipped with the compliance threats which will start to bite soon.
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