Businesses Seek Tech Assistance In Sharpening Their Financial Controls

As regulators take a closer look at corporate America's books, IT vendors and solution providers may be called in to help companies fine-tune their financial controls, industry executives and analysts say.

CIOs, for example, could help corporate officers capture and analyze business data via electronic audit committee (EAC) applications that supply a daily audit of their company's operations in "a continuously updated Form 8-K format," according to Jim Walker, an analyst at Forrester Research.

In a report released earlier this month, Walker said an EAC app could collect data to track profit drivers, log material events affecting business and monitor transactional patterns for potential fraud.

ERP vendors such as SAP and PeopleSoft likely will look to craft "audit dashboard portals" that build on current dashboard portal offerings by blending the capabilities of existing technologies,such as intelligence from fraud-detection and company-valuation analysis software,with accounting and management data from their customers, Walker said in the report.

Marvin Richardson, managing director and CTO of Chicago-based Lante, which is slated to be acquired by services firm SBI, said Lante's energy-sector clients have expressed interest in compliance management tools. "Specifically, [we are seeing] demand for the use of interactive dashboards for monitoring performance and reporting on regulatory and policy metrics," he said.

Lante recently teamed with Altio, an XML presentation and server technology company, to jointly develop and offer solutions that improve enterprise business processes. The alliance focuses on delivering apps such as executive dashboards, which aggregate content from internal and external systems and provide customized, realtime information.

Some solution providers say they've gained a new ability to compete for business once given to the consulting arms of Big Five accounting firms such as the embattled Arthur Andersen.

Padman Ramankutty, CEO of Bristlecone, Santa Clara, Calif., said he used to find himself in conversations where the CIO of a prospective client would say, "I like your team, but I have to go with company 'X' because they do our auditing."

Yet that's not the case any longer. "Smaller companies like us are gaining trust now because we don't have this audit coverage," Ramankutty said.