Value Driven Compliance
Sweetening the Pill

First published: February 2006

KEY FINDINGS

Compliance is clearly a business critical issue
When 100 IT Managers from the UK Financial Services sector were asked to rate the importance of compliance to their business, over 50% gave this the highest rating of 5 on a scale of 1 to 5. No one rated the importance of compliance below the level of 3.

Despite significant investment, IT capability still falls short in many areas
IT Managers confirm there have been significant demands placed on them as a result of compliance related activity over the past three years. Nevertheless, fewer than half say they are satisfied with the ability of current measures to cope with future requirements in the areas of document management, archiving and retrieval. The gap is even wider with regard to electronic messaging, where only one in twenty are fully satisfied with their capability.

Most expect the compliance related burden on IT to increase
Almost 60% of Financial Services IT Managers believe the compliance related burden on IT will increase in the future, with a further 22% saying it will not let up. This leaves just one in five respondents believing they are over the worst.

Opportunities exist to sweeten the pill
Independently of compliance, most IT managers cite business users suffering from difficulties in locating, accessing and presenting information as part of their day to day jobs, especially when information needs to be drawn from multiple systems. Significant ongoing and planned investments in areas such as document imaging are also leading to information processing, storage and retrieval requirements. With the right approach and appropriate technologies, there are opportunities to tackle such problems and compliance simultaneously, thereby shifting activity from a defensive to a value oriented approach.

Smart companies are putting more emphasis on an architectural approach
Many have already understood that the traditional piecemeal approach to dealing with compliance issues is not the most flexible and cost effective. Looking to the future, IT Managers therefore say there will be less emphasis on application specific initiatives and point solutions, and much more on building compliance capability into the underlying IT architecture. This goes hand in hand with adopting a more value driven approach to moving forwards and leads directly to the future proofing of investments and the minimisation of future risks.

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