Tuesday, February 24, 2009

It takes Genius....

“Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them.” - Albert Einstein.

In the wake of the upheaval caused by the near collapse of a leading IT firm, there has been a sudden increase in the concern for Corporate Governance across the Corporates in the country. These companies are now focusing their attention on how they can prevent problems from occurring in their organizations. The 2008 financial crisis has further emphasized the fact that prevention is often a far less bitter pill for an organization to swallow than the cure.

Policies, Procedures, Processes - you can draft these and cast them in stone till you are blue in the face, but an organization that cannot implement them, and having implemented them, monitor them well enough day after day, is still going to end up with egg on their face. What is required is a weapon that will allow the organization to keep things in order - monitor, detect, remediate and then track through to closure any material weaknesses that may inherently be lurking in the system. There are those who place a great deal of faith in their abilities to implement said processes and procedures and use paper and pencil to monitor and track without putting into place any system citing budget crunches to get around investing in a compliance system - but the simple fact remains - you cannot get around it. Prevention is better than cure. Detecting and nipping in the bud any problem lurking in the depths of the organization is better than wrestling with and putting it down once it has reared its ugly head. In short, as the quote says, intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them. And we have today that genius - and its name is technology.

Theres a very good blog post that talks about The Genius of Compliance Technology, which brings out nicely the fact that Compliance and risk management professionals that effectively utilize technology can make the difference between successful and unsuccessful firms.

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