The Ticket to Corporate Integrity

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

These days, the word "integrity" has taken on paramount importance in the world of business. We have been rocked by scandals such as Tyco, WorldCom and Enron, where corporate leaders have shown little integrity in how they managed a large multi-national corporation and in how they represented its financial numbers. By being dishonest about their organization's financial information, these leaders misled stock holders and employees to invest in the growth of an organization that wasn't actually growing.

In the aftermath of these scandals, we see an environment where integrity around all of a company's operations is critical in gaining stockholder trust. Sarbanes-Oxley, a comprehensive piece of legislation around financial reporting controls, has been established to restore the public's confidence in the numbers on corporate financial reports. Believe it or not, IT plays a large role in affirming the integrity of a corporation.

While IT cannot prevent collusion amongst a small set of executives to plunder corporate resources, it can establish a platform to validate the accuracy of a company's number. Reporting is all about data and the accuracy of that data is what integrity is all about. Since IT systems play an active role in capturing, processing and retention of data, IT plays a significant role in establishing data integrity.

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