SAP and Risk Automation
May 27, 2011
SAP information continues to flow to me. An attention grabber was the story “Who’s the Top Innovator: SAP or Oracle?” I scanned the article and wondered why the author ignored Apple? With the set of innovators limited to a relational database company and an IBM-influenced traditional enterprise software company, I concluded, “PR. Skip.”
However, the news release “Proviti Teams Up with SAP Labs U.S. to Enhance Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Analytics for CIOs and IT Executives” contained information that surprised me.
Proviti will be designing some automated controls to be employed in conjunction with SAP’s newest analytic application, BusinessObjects Executive IT Reporting.
The desired outcome is to give those at the top a well-rounded picture of the risks plaguing their businesses through a whole slew of buzz-word themed tools such as IT dashboards and key risk indicators. I like “well rounded” as a way to explain business fixes.
We found the following passage by the senior director of SAP’s IT strategy group to be particularly interesting:
Today, in many companies, IT controls and risk-management activities are at best manual, subjective activities. By automating these activities and linking them to business processes, we can allow customers to simplify their compliance and risk management activities, protect value by anticipating common losses, and create more value by taking on more calculated technology risk.
Do we sense an admission that when humans use software they create a content disaster? What took so long for that revelation?
The challenges of implementing enterprise solutions using IBM-style and SAP-like solutions are significant. The buzzword “governance” means that costs are tough to control and users often must adapt to systems, not the other way around. Governance is a signal to me that information chaos exists. So governance and other content-free words are used to cope with intractable issues. Are traditional enterprise software solutions to be to be subject to “governance”? Just an engineer’s skepticism at work.
What happened to TREX and Inxight? Search is apparently not an issue.
Sarah Rogers, May 27, 2011
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