16. IT-Enabled Compliance Solutions

Corporate frauds and fiascos are driving many enterprises towards taking a fresh look at compliance. Although compliance solutions haven’t been very popular on enterprise adoption charts till date, their evolution and entry into enterprises is inevitable, especially, given the current state of affairs. Diwakar Nigam, MD, Newgen Solutions, speaks to Biztech2, regarding some of the current issues surrounding implementations of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) frameworks, and digs deeper into the bigger picture.

Today, the main concern when it comes to compliance solutions is the lack of awareness towards implementing an IT-enabled compliance solution. Organisations need to be made aware about how manual methods are resource and time intensive and how existing IT-enabled compliance solutions can alleviate their compliance woes. The best way to uncover what is missing in today’s compliance solutions is to first implement existing compliance solutions. Until organisations deploy compliance solutions already available in the market, it is premature to comment on what’s missing in them.

Acts like Clause 49 only advocate what should be done to ensure compliance, but fail to state how the same should be done. Unless and until compliance regulations are implemented using an IT-enabled solution, there is no way to assess whether the prescribed regulations are enough to ensure adequate internal controls throughout the organisation. As mentioned above, compliance is an ever-evolving phenomenon. Any compliance solution cannot ensure 100 percent transparency and risk elimination.

Compliance mandates need to be regularly updated to ensure better corporate governance and risk mitigation. A compliance solution makes an organisation compliant by design, not by choice. While the lack of an automated compliance solution lends opportunity to cover up things, an IT-enabled solution ensures everything is transparent and cannot be covered up. A compliance solution ensures groundswell knowledge to everyone concerned and in a lucid way.