Business Intelligence Tools: The Smart Way to Achieve Compliance

Information Management Magazine, December 2005

Rebecca Graves

In today's competitive global economy, having the right information at the right time is crucial to an organization's ability to make the strategic, tactical and operational decisions that drive organizational goals forward. To better understand their business, organizations need intuitive query and reporting tools for advanced and consumer-level users to obtain access to critical business information that supports strategic and tactical decision making.

Business intelligence (BI) is fast becoming recognized as a strategic tool in business, especially in the legal, financial and government industries. According to an InformationWeek research BI survey of 300 business-technology professionals, the adoption of BI tools is fueled by compliance and regulatory requirements at two out of five of the businesses surveyed.¹ Organizations that want to leverage reporting capabilities to help meet compliance measures and mitigate risk are learning that BI tools can help them achieve this faster and easier, but they are also learning that BI can help them gain a competitive advantage.

Government regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Basel II and the U.S.A. Patriot Act require publicly traded organizations to provide company information quickly and without error. The clearly outlined criminal and civil penalties for C-level executives and external auditors if financial information is not accurate and complete have made compliance a top issue for these companies.

Even without the threat of heavy fines and jail time, a number of private companies are becoming compliant because they recognize the value in unifying their data and presenting an accurate and consolidated view of their organization's financial situation.

In order to become compliant, organizations must be able to organize their data, store it, understand what they have and access it at any given time. An enterprise-wide BI system can help companies overcome hurdles related to gathering, analyzing, presenting and storing information.

BI is an enterprise-strength query and reporting application that helps users ask questions about corporate data and visualize the answers for more effective decision making. A strong BI tool utilizes data models (graphical representations of underlying database structures) and a powerful reporting environment to access and analyze enterprise data sources quickly and easily. With a BI tool, users can easily create ad hoc queries complete with qualifications and prompts for answers to individual business problems. The powerful reporting capabilities allow organizations to create meaningful and eye-catching reports containing data from multiple sources with great ease.

In a report from Gartner (formerly META Group) entitled "Sarbanes-Oxley: The Impact on Financial Reporting," it is recommended that organizations focus on the following financial-reporting criteria:

• Collecting financial data,
• Making financial details more accessible,
• Drilling down on accounting reports,
• Highlighting key analysis areas based on tolerance and financial metrics,
• Segmenting reporting into significant elements,
• Enabling workflow,
• Offering frequent flash reporting, and
• Instilling a financial management mindset within the organization.²

Although CFOs/auditors and IT administrators agree that the goal of compliance is to ensure the integrity of an organization's financial results, they look at compliance differently. The two groups have similar issues but very different perspectives when they begin to break down the aspects of compliance. CFOs and auditors see workflows and processes, and they focus on their side of the following compliance aspects:

• Information: Financial information must be accurate, and fraud must be prevented.
• Access: Only authorized personnel may have access to confidential information.
• Procedures: Written procedures must be followed, and the correct authorizations must be obtained.
• Change: Enterprise processes must change and grow with the market, process changes must have the necessary authorizations and these changes must be adopted by everyone throughout the company.
• Auditing/Documentation: The correct set of reports must be generated to prove compliance, and the least amount of time must be spent to generate them.

Meanwhile, IT administrators focus on the following technological aspects of compliance:

• System: There must be no internal or external tampering with corporate data sources or applications.
• Access: Administrative control must be delivered to myriad administrators who need a particular software stack resident on a server.
• Procedures: Compliance must be incorporated into everyday IT tasks, and best practices must be followed.
• Change: Change requests must be matched with what actually happened in the infrastructure, ad hoc changes need to be accounted and controlled, and control must be secured while maintaining speed and flexibility.
• Auditing/Documentation: Reports must be generated to prove compliance, and the least amount of time should be spent generating these reports.

BI offers solutions to both sides. Incorporating BI into an organization allows these two groups, who have spoken different languages for so long, to finally understand each other.

However, some organizations are still skeptical about compliance tools. A few businesses are even willing to continue with manual documentation and reporting in spite of the lost productivity, while others are waiting to see exactly what enforcement the federal government will deal out before implementing a serious solution. Process and workflow mapping and documentation as part of the road to compliance must be done eventually, and company processes and procedures will change. Documents that were so carefully prepared by hand last year will become obsolete. Avoiding compliance is impossible, and not taking advantage of automated compliance is foolhardy. Why not take this opportunity to implement ways to automate the entire system and improve the overall business environment at the same time?

BI in the Legal Industry

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