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Sarbanes Oxley : Technology : Business Process Management
Future Proof Your Compliance Using BPM
The compliance journey has just begun
By
Charlie Dougherty
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Charlie Dougherty
VP Professional Services
Ultimus
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With the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), compliance quickly became a very complex undertaking. Companies have invested heavily to become SOX compliant with extensive expenditures in internal resources, external consultants, systems, and auditing with limited or no business value. This complexity and cost will continue to increase with new rules, extended regulations, and greater scrutiny by governing bodies.
Compliance is being understood as a process that evolves over time and has become an enterprise-wide issue involving many functional areas and systems. As a process, compliance must adapt to new rules or changes in regulations across the enterprise.
To reduce this complexity and generate improvement in process productivity, companies are looking to automation technologies to reduce costs and build more efficient, sustainable solutions. However, not every automation solution can provide appropriate efficiencies and ?future proof? the heavy compliance investment for long term value and flexibility.
How you automate is critical
Optimized automation results in greater effectiveness and efficiency than more basic automation performed by traditional workflow engines. For example, optimized automation includes real-time continuous monitoring for improved management and control, preventive capabilities to identify potential issues before they occur, and enable full lifecycle and issue management across internal controls, people, and applications.
Future proofing means that your investment can adapt and expand to incorporate new regulations across broader business processes. The most effective solutions extend to all business processes and will more effectively streamline company performance, and improve decision-making; thereby, adding significant business value. Also, extending the life of your compliance processes by adding the flexibility to keep them current to changes well into the future, provides for ?future proofing? through lower total cost of ownership over the process lifecycle.
BPM-based compliance
A Business Process Management (BPM) based foundation for compliance provides for complete lifecycle management of compliance processes, integrates them across technologies, and imbeds efficiency across people, processes, and technologies. It is the only solution that integrates compliance into business processes and is not constrained by systems or applications.
A solution to a company?s compliance needs begins with business goals alignment with an eye toward creating business value through process change initiatives. This alignment leads to a thorough understanding and design of representative processes typically following an industry standard framework (eg. COSO, COBIT, ITIL, etc.). BPM technology, through EAI and human-centric capabilities, automates the workflow and integration necessary to imbed the efficiency and effectiveness into the final solution. Outcomes are tangible business results driving productivity improvements and decision-making through real-time process information.
Looking to the future, BPM effectively separates the configuration of processes from systems and people; allowing changes to occur without complete re-invention or re-implementation of all of the moving parts. Processes are easily changed or expanded utilizing current systems and people across any geography or business function. BPM-based compliance ?Future Proofs? your investment long-term by enabling effective execution, life-cycle management, and integration of compliance into the ever-changing business world.
Future proof your solution for change and growth
Many of the point solutions on the market today simply cannot future proof your solution. Unlike compliance-specific point solutions, ERP, document management, or framework-only based solutions, BPM-based compliance is designed and built to handle your future requirements with a flexible and efficient solution that:
• Maximizes cost reductions, provides for growth, manages change and executes an integrated business strategy;
• Enables cross-enterprise integration to scale and extend management controls across the technology;
• Manages change effectively as requirements, laws, processes, and regulations change;
• Provides a structured but customizable environment to extend to other compliance and process automation requirements to minimize training costs;
• Allows for expansion from compliance-only processes to even broader BPM for greater business value.
A BPM-based compliance solution is the most efficient and flexible way to optimize and future proof your compliance investment to create long term business value
*James Neiser, Ph.D., CEO of Compliancy Software contributed to this article.
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