Advantage: Sarbanes-Oxley.

• Author: Heffes, Ellen M.
• Position: Domestics news

Just one year after the biggest change in corporate reporting was signed into law since the 1930s, most financial executives have made the move from shock and awe to acceptance and action. And they have a lot of help, as the US. entrepreneurial nature is spawning an array of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance activities--including software, publications, conferences and a slew o( information--for dealing with and coping in the new environment. The new attitude gives a positive spin to the inevitable. It says: We can't fight it," we have to do it, so let's turn it into an advantage.

At a recent corporate governance session at the Nasdaq Marketplace--co-sponsored by Nasdaq, Oracle Corp. and FEI--keynote speaker Jeffrey Henley, Oracle CFO and Executive Vice President, said of Sarbanes-Oxley: "It is not optional. There is a lot of expense, time and effort. But we've come to believe there is probably some real value that, hope fully, we are going to get. We didn't start out years ago thinking about Sarbanes-Oxley, but it turns out that the things we have done have dove-tailed very nicely with some of its requirements."

He then explained how Oracle had four years ago launched a major initiative to globalize and e-enable its five operating divisions in 60-plus countries, to get them all operating on one common set of business applications. The original goals were to centralize and automate processes to lower costs, improve efficiency, improve controls and to get better information for the company to improve transparency and accountability. Little did Oracle know that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act would require certain of these functions, in addition to having the CEO, CFO and the company's auditors attest to the accuracy of the information. Oracle's initiatives were applied across the company--finance, human resources, procurement, supply chain and customer relationship management--to get everyone around the world doing the same thing.

Henley describes the resulting enormous database as "a single source of truth, "where all of the applications integrate with each other and pass information between themselves and update or set up different, new information in the common database. "Now, documenting all of Oracle's processes and procedures will only have to be done once," he said.

The notion of controls involves many different things, one of which is having better information. In terms of managing internal controls--the heart of Section 404, Henley believes--the...