Recently I had breakfast with my insurance broker, who adds great value to my life. He began to talk of the hefty costs he incurs in his efforts to "be compliant". For a business such as his, he believed his options to be limited to manual compliance, but there are alternatives in our technology-rich world.
Everyone knows the catalyst for today`s compliance needs. While Enron`s fallout is settling fast, its ancillary impact gets stronger every day. Organisations of all shapes, sizes and types feel this impact. Even in SA, the implications of non-compliance are high, ranging from fines for the company to personal liability.
Compliance in SA
South Africa offers its fair share of governance requirements: the Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act, the Financial Intelligence Centre Act, the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act and the Municipal Finance Management Act all impact on the daily lives of individuals and organisations alike.
Of course, the various Acts or inputs impact each organisation differently. Compare a milk-bottler to my insurance broker: diversely different businesses but both still have accompanying compliance issues. The bottler must put reasonable quality testing processes in place to ensure the milk complies with specific health regulations and standards, and he must be able to prove these processes. On the other hand, my insurance broker must ensure each and every client is who he or she says they are.
Even though the milk-bottler`s compliance needs are different from those of my broker, there are common issues:
* Compliance is about better corporate governance and proving that governance is in place.
* Users across the organisation must be made aware of the processes and standards to which they must comply.
* Users must be aware of testing procedures for this compliance, being able to quantify the risks and potential impact of non-compliance.
* Administrators and managers must prove compliance for a specific time.
Easy alternatives
Technology is the primary vehicle to help organisations record and manage their compliance. The technology required - in whatever form it is delivered - speaks to the broad objectives of enterprise content management (ECM).
Without an effective filing mechanism and an ECM solution, there is no search technology in the world that can deliver the results needed.
Grant Hodgkinson, sales and marketing director, Mint Net.
When managing content in the organisation, it is essential to put a logical, hierarchical structure in place to facilitate the capture of this content. Managing content is not about creating digital landfill. Rather it is about creating a logical filing system that everyone can embrace. If an organisation is simply documenting an internal process, the document describing that process still needs a logical filing mechanism that everyone can find easily, and understand.
Managers must obtain snapshots of their non-compliant business areas and understand the associated risk. If this information is not fed into a structured system, the risks cannot be determined without incurring huge effort. An effectively implemented ECM system helps to address this.
Moreover, administrators and managers need to search for specific information as required. It could be as innocent as a question about a testing process or as serious as proving that someone did something, when a lawyer asks for details. Without an effective filing mechanism and an ECM solution, there is no search technology in the world that can deliver the results needed.
An approach to content management that can document the necessary actions of every member in an organisation and record the results of all testing processes is vital. Since processes, measurements and reporting all create content, an ECM solution is both critical to delivering to the process holistically and doing so cheaply and effectively enough for any organisation.
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