The Sarbanes-Oxley Boom?
October 8, 2003
Is it me, or does every fourth email I receive mention how Sarbanes-Oxley compliance can be reached with technology from (enter the name of a CMS platform vendor here)?
Sarbanes-Oxley is about transparency, accuracy, and completeness of record keeping. Isn't this exactly what enterprise content management (in its broadest sense) is supposed to do? Implemented correctly, an enterprise CMS can precisely manage important documents and related data, establish and enforce a workflow, and accurately report on the entire lifecycle of the document. So, yes, enterprise CMS technology can support these aspects of Sarbanes-Oxley.
Of course, the question remains, did we need a law to tell us this was a good idea? This suggests to me that the people who have historically championed technologies such as document management and content management have been ahead of the curve. It also suggests to me that, Sarbanes-Oxley aside, well established content management practices are a good thing.
Posted by Bill Trippe at October 8, 2003 11:12 AM
Comments
Hello Glenn,
Yes, you are exactly right. Sarbanes-Oxley is indeed about financial reporting, compliance, governance, and transparency. It does not have to do with more general project and organizational management.
The reason it is mentioned in the context of content management is because larger organizations do use content management tools to help manage financial data and reports. And this is content management in its broadest sense, where content includes documents, scanned images from financial workflows, and so on.
Hope this helps, and thanks for posting.
Bill
Posted by Bill Trippe at January 13, 2004 10:03 PMI just reviewed a program that seems to be very useful in the SOX world. The demostrated publishing government finacials reports that seem to be a good fit for "transparency". The person showing us the stuff represented a company named FML. The have some tools for database extraction that publish into some Adobe products. The docs left here read as Patternstream. Interesting find.
Posted by david at April 1, 2004 3:11 PMPost a comment
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I'm seeing a lot or sarbanes-oxley flak flying around too. But I guess I'm coming at it from a different perspective. Everything I read about SO compliance has to do with financial governance, auditing and reporting. I don't see the direct tie-in to content managment systems ( at least no the kind of CMS used to drive newspaper websites ). SO compliance is being tossed around like a magic incantation in meetings related to time-reporting, help desk, graphic design, etc. AM I wrong thinking that Sarbanes-Oxley has nothing to do with the percent of effort needed to switch a website from plain old html to css?
Posted by glenn at January 13, 2004 12:17 PM