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Sarbanes-Oxley: A Continuing Distraction
About this time last year, major corporations were racing against the clock to certify their systems and conduct Sarbanes-Oxley attestation, or "S-Ox" attestation as it was often affectionately known. Sarbanes-Oxley dominated the press, and fear of non-compliance and being led off to jail struck fear deep in the hearts of the average IT worker.
For the large accounting firms and consulting firms, Sarbanes-Oxley signaled revitalization in the services sector that had not been seen since the late 1990s. Life was good for auditors, and bad for IT shops putting them right in the crosshairs of the company CFO. For corporate audit committees, it was an education into new terms in IT such as separation of duties, data reconciliation and change control. Somehow, after the attestation deadline had passed and the dust had settled, no CIOs had been led off to jail because some system that paid a supplier in Turkey had generated an inaccurate PO.
2004 was clearly the year of Sarbanes-Oxley within IT, just like 1999 had been the year of "Year 2000." This year, Sarbanes-Oxley has moved from most important on the IT agenda to the biggest pain for IT professionals. Sarbanes-Oxley has turned all of us creative IT types into bureaucrats needing to produce mountains of test results, dotting every "i" and crossing every "t" in our systems design, and having to endure a litany of control …
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"Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs." - Scott Adams |