Lifting the curtain on Australians compliance culture
Lifting the curtain on Australians compliance culture
Oct 19, 2005: Canon Australia have released some important research this week on compliance and Australia's compliance and document management priorities.
The first, a paper by Professor Allan Fels, is an independent whitepaper that makes a strong case for compliance and discusses the ways in which technology is playing an important role in corporate compliance programs.
"One only has to look at the Vizard insider trading case, Pan Pharmaceuticals and HIH to name a few where reputations have not only been tarnished but also, in some cases, businesses disappear because of a lack of a culture of compliance." said Professor Fels in the whitepaper. "Having an effective compliance system... should prevent an encounter with the regulators or, at the very least, give an organization the capacity to... demonstrate due diligence to the regulator and ultimately the courts if it gets that far,"
Sponsored by Canon and endorsed by the Australian Compliance Institute, AMTIL and Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, Professor Fels paper is not restricted to CLERP 9, Basel II and other financial compliance measures. Rather, it addresses all compliance issues in the context of the Australian Standard on Compliance Programs. It shows how systems that are implemented just to prevent compliance breaches can in the end become beneficial to the smooth running of the business.
In conjunction with the release of Professor Fel's paper, Canon has also unveiled the results of a recent survey of Australian companies. Whilst this survey is not related to the whitepaper, the results mirror the whitepaper's focus on all areas of compliance.
"Our customers are committed to complying with all regulatory requirements, which is another reason why we've moved beyond providing isolated printing and scanning devices to building complete document capture, output and management systems." said David Gradwell, Canon Australia Business Imaging Services Group's national marketing manager. "Professor Allan Fels' whitepaper will help or customers, our consultants and anyone who reads it to make sense of the complex human and technical challenges posed by today's regulatory environment."
Canon rallied 152 Aussie business-technology decision makers to complete the survey, 46% of which employ over 100 people and the remaining 54% under 100. Some of the results were:
- 20.49% of respondents said OH&S regulations were prompting them to review their approach to managing documents- 49.66% had a document management strategy whilst 74.82% intended to review theirs- 80.54% said that the volume of information in their organisation had increased in the last year. None reported a decrease.
Professor Fels' whitepaper is available for download free of charge from Canon's website.
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