Indian companies are poor in legal compliance

Indian companies lag behind their Asia-Pacific counterparts in regulatory compliance, as per the 2007 Asia Pacific CIO Survey, conducted by MarketShare for software firm Serena Software. The survey interviewed nearly 350 CIOs from medium and large companies across the Asia Pacific Region, including 50 from India. The highlights of the survey are

• Only 18% of Indian companies have implemented regulatory compliance programmes, much lower tahn the Asia Pacific average of 42%.


• 68% of Indian chief information officers (CIOs) agreed that there are business benefits in regulatory compliance initiatives


• 45% of Indian CIOs are planning to implement compliance initiatives by 2008 end.


• In APAC, Japan (56%) is the leader in implementing compliance initiatives, followed by Sungapore (52%) and South korea (38%).


• 88% of Indian CIOs realise the importance of IT in ensuring regulatory compliance


• Only 44% of Indian CIOs said the upper management supported the role of IT for compliance


• Only 40% of Indian CIOs are ready to take the accountability for legal compliance whereas the APAC average is 67%


• Only 20% said they currently spend more than 15% of their total IT budget on compliance-related activities while 26% planned to spend over 15% of their total IT budget onn comapliance related activities over the next two years


• While 52% of Indian CIOs said compliance is important 'to do business/trade with foreign companies', 32% said it was required 'to increase the company potential of partnering with foreign companies'


• For Asia Pacific, the companies that have implemented compliance programmes has doubled to 42% in 2007 from only 21% in the preceding year.