Making IT systems compliant with the Companies Bill,
which had its second reading in Parliament last week, could cost UK
businesses millions of pounds.
Mike Davis, senior research analyst at Butler Group, said many UK
businesses would need a radical rethink of IT systems to comply
with the legislation.
"Any organisation will have a raft of existing infrastructure, such
as reporting systems, very few of which will be up to scratch in
terms of meeting the bill's requirements," he warned.
"Few can deliver the information within required timescales with
any accuracy without a great deal of manual overhead."
The proposed Companies (Audit, Investigations and Community
Enterprise) Bill will have as radical an impact on UK companies as
the Sarbanes-Oxley Act had in the US. Failure to make these
investments quickly and correctly will leave UK businesses prone to
severe financial penalties, said Butler Group.
But it pointed out that the technologies needed to ensure
compliance are also those that can allow organisations to make
business decisions more effectively.
Technologies for compliance
Technologies that Butler Group has identified as being key to
the Companies Bill are:
- Business process management: ensures that specific tasks are
assigned to the appropriate people within the organisation in a
fully auditable and transparent way. As BPM can automate tasks, it
allows the organisation to have greater control over high-risk
accounting
- Disaster recovery: essential for ensuring the safe retention of
key information
- E-mail management: taking control of e-mails and the
information they contain lIdentity and access management: ensuring
the correct level of security over information and data
- Network security: preventing unauthorised access to information
and data
- Policy management: ensuring that the right policies are in
place to govern the type of data stored, how it is stored and how
long for
- Records management: the management of information from the
moment it is stored through to its deletion
- Search, discovery and retrieval: Allows key documents, e-mails
and other records to be found on request.