Information Management And Future Of Governance

Business Intelligence Software

Business Intelligence software is the technology of choice to go beyond the Ken Lay defense, that wasn't my responsibility — it was the fault of internal audit, the external auditor or the accounting department." The message from Sarbanes Oxley is the buck stops here, period! CEOs and CFOs have to find a way to be aware of every beat of the pulse of business activity in their company even as they are absorbed with strategic management. Companies agonize over its potential to add to several layers of bureaucracy and slow down the decision making process. The smarter companies, on the other hand, are integrating their business intelligence software with their compliance systems to monitor activity in their companies without being intrusive. For example, the monitoring of fraud activity can happen by keeping track of unusual or suspicious transactional activity. Auditors can then focus their attention on transactions that are most likely to be fraudulent.

Automation of compliance has also yielded other unintended benefits of uncovering information that was spread out on myriad Excel sheets and other formats. The thorough going review of controls and procedures has enabled companies to unearth the information and to begin to analyze for their strategic planning. One case of this is Crown Media which decided to upload its entire Excel on new compliance and business intelligence software. In addition, the software has the ability to create processes for monitoring each financial transaction. If a transaction is conducted by the unauthorized person or without the approval of the assigned person, the program triggers a warning.

Crown Media is realizing a benefit from this investment which it has not expected at the outset. The new software has made the company data available throughout the company and accessible anywhere in the company. The data on advertising contracts is not buried in some spreadsheet in an obscure corner of the company. This has enabled Crown Media to conduct marketing campaigns involving sales and other operations to realize business benefits that are generally done by its larger competitors.

The appetite for new business intelligence technologies for compliance varies across companies and most were, till recently, unwilling to take the plunge or and preferred to adapt their content management infrastructure to adapt them for compliance purposes. Lately, however, companies have shown a much greater interest in integrating their internal controls with enterprise management systems as they realize that they can recoup their investments in processes to reap benefits of better risk management.

The more significant benefits of information sharing will be realized when company management, including the Boards of Directors, is able to use the information from dashboards to guide the destiny of their companies. According to the AT Kearney survey cited above, the large majority of directors felt that the lack of tools and processes providing early warning signs (41%) was the single most important barrier to their effectiveness followed by adequate and relevant information for their needs (22%) and board culture close behind (21%). An overwhelming majority still rely on management presentations (90%) while only 6% use business intelligence software dashboards. Most directors expressed dissatisfaction with their current sources of information and will prefer forward looking information with details of performance data such as shifts in repeat customers, demographics and customer segments and sales performance data all of which is more readily available from dashboards.

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