Johannesburg, 16 Mar 2010
With the new King III regulations that came into effect this month and the new Companies Act that will be passed in the near future, companies fast need to address the issues around IT governance, risk and compliance, and also understand the role IT has in driving this process.
SCT Services CEO Victor van der Watt says technology like SAP BusinessObjects is available to simplify the processes of good corporate governance, risk mitigation and regulatory compliance.
“Acknowledging the integral role of IT in business, King III specifically addresses issues around IT governance. It recommends that IT should be an integral part of any company's strategy and says it is crucial for IT to be built into the business plan, as its main role is to facilitate the achievement of business strategy and add value.”
The risks involved in IT governance have become significant considering that IT systems have become integral to a company's strategy and business. The report suggests that a company's management, or even the board, should be directly involved in IT governance, risk and compliance.
SAP BusinessObjects helps ensure that corporate strategies reflect today's business risks and opportunities and that the proper controls are in place to mitigate and manage risk, support regulatory compliance, and execute strategic goals. The applications help unify and align risk and compliance management processes under a single enterprise framework, across business units, regardless of whether the solutions are supporting IT, audit, financial, or trade processes.
Van der Watt says the first step toward gaining strategic alignment is ensuring that the information you have is accurate and that IT and management believe that to be the case. “You need a single, trusted environment for the collection, movement, and distribution of data. Most organisations have a variety of data locked in various internal silos, but also rely on key data that exists outside the organisation's walls. You must establish a unified, certified view across these disparate sources to enable confident, quality decisions.
“Not only does your company need to run its business effectively and efficiently, but you are also held accountable for the way you run your business. Main barriers preventing companies from optimising business performance include ambiguity between strategy and execution, lack of balance between risk and opportunity, and lack of visibility throughout the entire business cycle,” he explains.
The SAP BusinessObjects portfolio helps organisations optimise business performance by enabling them to connect strategy to execution and achieve strategic alignment, predictable performance and make confident decisions. It provides a holistic approach that brings together solutions for optimising business performance, including business intelligence (BI); information management (IM); enterprise performance management (EPM); and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC).
The broad family of tools and applications helps teams optimise performance by enabling strategic alignment, predictable performance, and confident decisions. The solutions support the establishment of trusted information, the ability to proactively manage risk, and the creation of enterprise visibility, regardless of the underlying applications or data stores. SAP BusinessObjects solutions work together to help balance risk and opportunity as well as provide strategic alignment.
All categories of SAP BusinessObjects solutions work with enterprise resource planning software from both SAP and other vendors. With the SAP BusinessObjects solutions, companies can maximise strategic and operational performance by cost-effectively managing regulations and policy compliance while proactively mitigating business risk.
The solutions support data integration, data quality management, metadata management, and master data management. With SAP BusinessObjects, customers have an integrated data integration and data quality management solution with one interface, one administration console, and one source of metadata. To help ensure that one has trusted information, SAP BusinessObjects solutions provides access to a variety of data sources, integrates and consolidates one's data, and cleans and improves one's data. Customers can reconcile and harmonise data from different systems, as well as understand where their data originates.
He says this approach helps ensure that companies are not exposed to unnecessary risks or control failures. “These solutions can support multi-vendor systems across enterprises and support a unified governance, risk, and compliance approach. SAP BusinessObjects solutions help ensure that corporate strategies reflect today's business risks and opportunities and that the proper controls are in place to mitigate and manage risk, support regulatory compliance, and execute strategic goals.”
“The applications help unify and align risk and compliance management processes under a single enterprise framework, across business units, regardless of whether the solutions are supporting IT, audit, financial, or trade processes,” he concludes.