The Real Value in Sarbanes-Oxley
APRIL 10, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Fear can be a powerful generator of upstanding conduct, say Stephen Wagner and Lee Dittmar. But business runs on discovering and creating value. In this month's Harvard Business Review, the co-authors discuss how smart companies are finding unexpected benefits in Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Wagner, who is the managing partner of the U.S. Center for Corporate Governance at Deloitte & Touche, and Dittmar, who leads the enterprise governance consulting practice at Deloitte Consulting and co-leads its Sarbanes-Oxley practice, talked with Kathleen Melymuka about how your company can use compliance requirements to its advantage.
Personally I find the last statement in the article the most interesting:
It seems that a lot of these Sarbanes-Oxley benefits are the kinds of things that CIOs have been advocating for years, with mixed results.
DITTMAR: I agree. CIOs say, "Things would be better if we standardized on a particular application," and the business units say, "Sure, as long as everybody moves to mine." So this is an opportunity not just for CIOs to step up but to get various CXO stakeholders to understand all the elements -- people, process and technology -- because they all have to go together. The president of a very large technology company recently told me that compliance will be the single largest driver of IT priorities over the next decade. CIOs have a very important role to play, and even though they've been frustrated over the last decade, the impacts of IT are pervasive, and companies can't do this efficiently and effectively without properly leveraging technology. It's not enough to just write good policies and processes; you have to have technology to support it, or it won't be sustainable.
