IT departments placed under increasing pressure to address compliance issues

Despite the worldwide focus on compliance, CIOs do not appear to be concerned with assisting organisations with achieving compliance - or is the problem that they lack the capacity to comply?

These are some of the issues that surfaced during a survey of 400 European CIS, CTS and IT directors commissioned by Compuware Corporation.

"The question," says Jorge Borralho, Regional Sales Manager of Compuware SA, "is that if European CIOs are either not concerned with compliance or lack compliance capacity, can the situation in South Africa be very different. And what can be done about this?"

According to the survey, despite the fact that 94% of respondents acknowledge that they are increasingly responsible for ensuring IT applications meet regulatory compliance demands, 72% described their attitude as "not at all concerned or not very concerned" about being held personally responsible for non-compliance.

"The survey also found that one in three respondents hasn't even started to put an IT governance framework into place. Yet effective IT management and governance is key to assisting corporations in meeting many of these compliance demands," he adds.

According to Borralho compliance has placed a huge burden on IT departments, which does not only have to ensure that its own house is in order, but also help other departments with their compliance needs. Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed stated that other business functions are also approaching the IT department for help with meeting compliance regulations. The increasing complexity of regulations is becoming a major headache with 75% of respondents stating this is their biggest external barrier to achieving regulatory compliance.

"One of the key challenges IT departments face in assisting organisations to achieve compliance is a lack of sophistication in their own management processes. For example 34% are reliant on paper-based reports and a further 43% rely on face-to-face or conference meetings with managers, meaning that 77% are not effectively tracking efforts toward important projects such as compliance.

"It's not surprising that companies are having such difficulties in achieving compliance when so many are reliant upon manual methods to keep up-to-date with the status of their IT work.

"Given that compliance is meant to be a top business priority, organisations need tools that can centralise and effectively monitor IT in order to maximise their chances of IT and compliance success," he concludes.