Founded Fear?

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

Corporate executives breathed a sense of relief last June when the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was revised to specifically address "internal controls over financial reporting" versus the broad-based internal controls around all of the organization's financial processes that Sarbanes-Oxley initially addressed.

While corporations have succeeded in mitigating the IT blow to the enterprise by limiting the scope of IT change, complying with Sarbanes-Oxley would be best served by building a financial data warehouse in every corporation in America. Many companies plan to meet the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley by documenting existing manual processes and the IT systems that feed them. You may still have an Excel spreadsheet that takes data from various systems and integrates it for corporate reporting. In this day and age, the companies that choose to continue manual financial reporting processes are only shortchanging themselves in the power that a financial data warehouse can bring to the corporation. Sarbanes-Oxley can be a catalyst to justify this enabler.

A financial data warehouse can serve as the single point of information for every piece of information about the financial health of your corporation. It can integrate cost information from every division and revenue information against every product and present a single picture of all of the financial …

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