COSO, Turnbull and Sarbanes-Oxley are
all frameworks are designed to support corporate
governance initiatives, whose main goal is to protect
and increase shareholders’ value through the management
of risk. They are based on the approach that performance
of a corporation is improved when management is
focused on well-defined issues and made accountable
for their activities. Through systematically understanding
and recording the objectives of business activity,
the risks that could prevent these objectives from
being reached, and the controls that will channel
activities and energy into the right and relevant
direction, a coherent structure for risk management
is established.
Optial reduces the administrative burden associated
with compliance with
these guidelines and more importantly, provides
the infrastructure to obtain real business value
from their implementation.
Objectives, risks, controls and checklists are
an integral part of the Optial solution, which
also includes the option of using targets, success
factors, Key Risk
Indicators and other business measures. Since
Optial can be configured without the need to change
code, each company can choose which parts of the
framework are to be employed.
By linking objectives, risks and controls to the
corporation’s organisational structure, Optial
provides a transparent and comprehensive overview
of the drivers within an organisation, to emphasise
an environment of accountability.
The Institute of Internal Auditors remarks that:
‘Self-assessment
questionnaires are the tools most often used
for soft control evaluation in a Sarbanes-Oxley context...
Soft controls … lend themselves to an entity-wide
evaluation technique. A self-assessment questionnaire
can gather evidence from across the organization,
with relatively little effort (compared to other
techniques) by the evaluator.’ (from The IIA
Research Foundation: Internal Auditor’s Role in
Corporate Governance, researched by James Roth
and Donal Espersen).
Optial contains a complete Checklists module with
a number of features ideally suited to corporate
governance reviews. For example, Optial is content-neutral,
supporting the management of libraries of templates,
whether sourced from external parties or developed
internally. Multiple different types of answers
can be defined, including single select, multiple
select, text, numeric, currency and date questions.
Being able to assign weights and scores to answers
means that qualitative controls can be evaluated
uniformly.
Fundamentally, by storing this information within
the structured framework of Optial, the information
basis for the risk management cycle is gathered and
retained, remaining easily accessible online for
reporting and review. |
