Technology implementation for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and organizational culture

Organizational Philosophies and Technology

The intent of this paper is to evaluate how companies are using technologies to define, set, manage and enforce ethical standards throughout their organizations. The use of technologies for ensuring compliance to ethical standards can also have a significant effect on the culture a company promotes, which is covered in this paper as well. The selective use of technologies can also have a significant affect on how organizations perform their human resource functions as well, a topic also discussed in this paper.

Using Technologies to Ensure Compliance to Ethical Guidelines

With the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) the requirement of organizations publicly-traded on American stock exchanges to adhere to the Acts' requirements for compliance and financial reporting significantly re-aligned internal information systems. In many organizations the it systems had to be completely redesigned to provide for more efficient reporting and analysis of financial results to be in compliance to the requirements of SOX. The factor that above all else drives a high level of urgency within organizations to align their it systems with the need for compliance is the audit process completed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of all publicly-traded organizations.

Inherent in Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts is the synchronizing of the many databases and data marts that contain financial data in addition to managing content of all forms more transparently than has been the case in the past. The growth of analytics, database integration technologies and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has been in direct response to the need for greater coordination of financial data and the re-defining of processes to make Sarbanes-Oxley compliance easier accomplished including successful completion of audits by Sarbanes-Oxley auditors.

Columbus and Murphy (2002) defined through their series of research initiatives on the adoption of enterprise content management (ECM) as a unifying strategy across all content stores had a 5% penetration rate into many organizations. The more fragmented content sources are in an organization the greater the need for peer-to-peer storage architectures. Columbus and Murphy found that business strategies are driving the need for peer-to-peer integration points across homegrown, legacy, third party, best-of-breed, and ERP systems' databases. Accountants and financial professionals in companies who are working to achieve Sarbanes-Oxley compliance are responsible for making their systems, processes, and reports ready for auditors to approve. These SOX Audits are what the Securities and Exchange Commission looks at in addition to a company's own auditor's review to ensure all financial statements and the processes used to produce them are consistent and clear in their results. Often SOX Auditors are finding that the underlying processes, not the reports or financial analysis, are what need fine-tuning.

The lessons learned from going through a SOX audit, pointing out key reasons why companies fail their security and compliance audits, are next described. Most significant is the change required within an organizations' culture when an entirely new set of compliance requirements are introduced. Change management forces many organizations to completely re-align processes to ensure their broader compliance strategies are adopted and successful (Regan, O'Connor 2002). Changing processes requires that the employees most affected by the change buy into the new approaches to getting work done, and in fact become owners of the next process.

How Technologies Used in Human Resources Affect Company Culture

Human Resources' role in implementing and sustaining change in organizations is to first focus on which processes need to be re-designed and made more efficient to get roadblocks out of the way for employees to better do their jobs. Technologies used for completing human resource functions need to concentrate on supporting the process of change in organizations first (Regan, O'Connor 2002). Applying technologies within Human Resources needs to be defined first by the use of Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) techniques to streamline key process areas before technology is ever applied to the systems in question. The critical requirements in Human Resources of being more attuned to how to attract, sustain, grow and continually incent employees to deliver the highest levels of performance by nature must first be orientated towards processes with technologies selectively applied. Once technologies are selectively applied to the key process areas, the culture of an organizations' Human Resources department can choose to either become more constrictive and fixed in their mindsets or more open and focused on developmental planning and a growth mindset overall. The direction of technologies in general and it specifically must be aligned with the broader objectives of the Human Resources department to ensure strategic plans are attained company-wide. As more and more organizations rely primarily on their people to attain key strategic objectives, the challenge in implementing technologies is to ensure they align with the needs of employees on the one hand while providing for adequate levels of compliance on the other. The bottom line is that cultural changes in an organization through the use of technologies in human resources need to concentrate on more collaboration, coordination and synchronization of processes than would have been possible before.