Maturity Issues
Posted on December 9th, 2009 by Katina »Permalink
Our friends over at Thomson Reuters/Paisley have a new survey out with Compliance Week that makes for some very interesting reading about just how far executives are taking their GRC initiatives (hint: not as far as you’d think).
The survey, which asked 386 compliance, risk, and audit executives how they’re managing their GRC chores, found that a solid majority are still relying on standard Microsoft products like Word and Excel for everything from policy documentation to risk assessments.
Not to knock Excel and its fab data-sorting and column-highlighting skills (not to mention the graphs, which we could really go on and on about), but this is a little surprising to some of us, given how much ink and attention the value of automated GRC solutions has been getting in recent years.
Consider this nugget from the Compliance Week piece on the survey – that a centralized GRC platform can net companies a 30-40% savings in reporting time – especially companies like the one independent analyst Michael Rassmussen sometimes references, which collects 38,000 spreadsheets for the purpose of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance alone. “Can you have a complete product for SOX w/out automated testing? I don’t think so – that’s where the money is for companies,” Rasmussen says.
Automated testing is what we’re all about here at Approva. For companies that are still relying on Excel it’s often tough for companies to figure out where to start. Our advice? Start with the greatest pain points whether that’s Accounts Payable, monitoring the General Ledger or tossing the spreadsheets and automating the periodic reviews of user access. The nice thing about using a platform instead of Excel is that once you have it in place it’s easy to extend your continuous auditing and continuous monitoring to other pain points.
As Tom Eid, Research Director for Gartner Dataquest says, “The more sophisticated the analysis needs to be done, the more sophisticated the level of software tools you need.”
February 24th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
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