At the height of the furor over Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, Dennis Powell, the then-CFO of Cisco Systems, made an intriguing admission about the company's progress toward compliance: "We found inefficiencies ... that we hadn't focused on before because they were under the radar. There were significant opportunities for improving our processes."
Powell, who retired from Cisco earlier this year, wasn't the only CFO to articulate the revelation that complying with regulations could actually be beneficial to a company. Interestingly, boosting compliance beyond regulatory issues can also be beneficial.
The key is expanding your view of compliance. "You also have to comply with company policies," says William Copacino, CEO of Oco, Inc., a Waltham, Mass.-based developer of hosted BI solutions. "You may have commitments with customers regarding how much they'll buy and what kind of a discount you'll give them if they do."
Internally as well, you have to conform to certain rules when you file expense reports. Department heads have to conform to their budgets. Business intelligence tools can help you monitor progress when it comes to complying with these non-regulatory issues, and make you more efficient at the same time. "Normally you don't find out if you're over budget until the end of the quarter," says Copacino. "But by using BI tools, you get immediate visibility into what's being charged against your budget."
You can derive the same visibility for service level agreements, says Caron Mooney, a director at Johannesburg, South Africa-based IS Partners, a global consulting firm specializing in business intelligence. One of her clients has 1,000 stores all over South Africa, some in small towns. It has SLAs with dozens of service providers, relating to computer repair, store maintenance and suppliers. When there's a problem, an employee at one of the stores calls a help desk, which logs the call and contacts the service provider, which then reports completion of their responsibility.
"We applied business intelligence to the help desk system, and we can analyze whether the service providers are complying with their service level agreements," says Mooney. "You can then sit down with the supplier and negotiate a lower price based on their performance."
Applying BI to compliance can ultimately give you a better view of your overall performance, Mooney insists, even if your original concern was regulatory compliance. Another of her customers, a mining firm, applied BI tools to both its human-resources tracking system and its facilities-tracking system because it had to comply with strict social and health regulations about how long miners could be underground, and the temperatures and airflow it had to maintain in the mines.
"But at the same time, it found that it could use the BI tools running against a data warehouse to calculate how many workers it took to mine how much gold," Mooney says. "The company was better able to correlate its costs to its revenues."
Clearly, applying BI tools to compliance data can give you insight to all kinds of rules. Whether the motivation comes from regulations or policies or customer service, the outcome is the same, says Copacino: "It helps you run your business better."
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