Business process management: The future of SOX 404

January 25, 2005, 07:12 PM —  ITworld.com — 

By Michael Ramos

Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires companies to document, test, and evaluate the effectiveness of their internal control. Complying with these requirements is proving to be complex, and not surprisingly, many management teams have looked to software solutions to help meet the challenge. To date, most solutions focus narrowly on the documentation requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, using database functionality to capture, store and report pertinent information about controls.

Looking forward, when internal control monitoring and reporting becomes routine, management will require a more comprehensive solution than a warehouse of control descriptions. Anticipating these needs, providers of business process management software are beginning to offer solutions that ultimately may provide greater benefit to companies affected by Sarbanes-Oxley.

Act I: Documenting Control Procedures

The Limits of a Documentation Warehouse

Because of Sarbanes-Oxley, companies are now required to maintain documentation of significant business processes and the related controls. As business processes change, two things must happen:

  • The existing controls related to the previous business process must be evaluated and, if necessary, changed to reflect the new process, and
  • The company

    ITworld.com

    Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
    Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
peer-to-peer

jfruh
Apple syncing patent can't come soon enough

pasmith
New Twitter features borrow from 3rd party clients

Esther Schindler
Open Source Changes the Software Acquisition Process

mikelgan
How to set up continuous podcast play on the new iTunes

David Strom
Five important Windows 7 mobility features

sjvn
Guard your Wi-Fi for your own sake                        

Sandra Henry-Stocker
Grepping on Whole Words

 

Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325

Join the conversation here

The Daily Tip

The Daily TipQuick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.

Hot tips:

Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.

Newsletters

Subscribe to ITWORLD TODAY and receive the latest IT news and analysis.

I would like to receive offers via email from ITworld partners.
By clicking submit you agree to the terms and conditions outlined in ITworld's privacy policy.
Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace