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| Wednesday, 15 January 2009 - The Australian Computer Society (ACS) today called for a stronger focus on corporate governance and professionalism for Australia’s ICT community in light of the Satyam developments and the ongoing global financial crisis. “While the recent corporate governance failure of Satyam Computers will have an impact on business confidence of offshore companies, there’s no turning back the clock on globalisation. Outsourcing and offshoring is a reality of our industry. Satyam employs a significant number of Australian ICT professionals and the ACS is keen to minimise any impact on them. “Corporate Governance regulations have been on the agenda for Governments and industry for a number of years and as a consequence of the issues we’ve seen around the world since Enron, it is likely that this scrutiny and control tightening is likely to continue after the recent incidence with Satyam and is appropriate. The ACS would like to see the Government introducing improved corporate governance standards for local operations with overseas parent companies, so that impact on Australians is minimised. “We expect some of the corporate failures we’ve seen in the past few months are going to lead to a healthy degree of scrutiny of corporate governance of both offshore and onshore companies in the ICT sector”, said Ms Denham. “What we need to see however is a balance between risk management, and an ongoing level of innovation and expansive thinking. It would be a mistake for Australian companies to take knee jerk decisions at this time, including reactive cost cutting or to retract any offshore plans without weighing up all of the factors.” “We have a good number of ACS members that work for Satyam in Australia. At this time we would suggest that these workers in Australia focus on professionally delivering the services to their clients to ensure that their value is not diminished in the current circumstances”, said Ms Denham.
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