Michael, I would agree that improving business processes related to company's financials is the primary task of SOX, and if a company chooses to use BPM and SOA then that is their choice. I agree that automation and integration for financial processes helps to improve the sustainability of the compliance efforts, but it is not essential according to the law. Many financial processes are driven manually based on Excel spreadsheets, and can continue to do so if they are willing to test and audit these processes frequently. And they will probably do so.
As for the organizations I talked to (some large mobile telco, software, and media firms), they were struggling enough to actually understand what processes to include in their SOX projects. They were in no position back in 2005 to even consider the radical efforts required to do BPM and SOA correctly. Perhaps they are getting closer to doing this now (though I expect they are still in survival mode), but it will take the business problems to be wrestled out of the hands of the CFO and Controller, and passed to a group that has time to do the right thing. That is hard given the focus of SOX, placing the blame for failures squarely at the door of the CFO and CEO. I would avoid suggesting to the financial teams that SOX is at all a technology problem. Even the IT teams that must show good management of core systems probably don't consider BPM/SOA an essential component. I have seen many vendors claiming SOX as another reason to sell their software, so messages are getting confused. Of course, if you have different experiences, please shout out. Cheers Phil http://improving-nao.blogspot.com Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
