In Detail

It seems that every year since the Enron collapse there has been a fresh debacle that refuses to lower the spotlight from corporate Governance, Risk, and Compliance management.

Before Sarbanes Oxely forced company managers to become risk conscious, if you asked a chief executive whether he thought he had adequate internal controls, the most likely answer would have been “What is an internal control?”

This is clearly no longer the case. Every week some story breaks detailing a lack of good governance, a failure to plan for a foreseeable catastrophe or a failure to comply with an important law or regulation. These stories bring GRC themes into public view, and public scrutiny, and make management and directors keen to show they have put their best efforts forward to govern their companies well, manage risks to the enterprise, and to comply with all applicable laws.

Perhaps only Oracle and SAP are in a position to really address all three aspects. The mission of GRC applications is to ensure that the managers and directors of Enterprises that run such applications have a strong defensible position.

Written by industry experts with more than 30 years combined experience, this book covers the Governance, Risk Management and Compliance Management of a large modern enterprise and how the IT Infrastructure, in particular the Oracle IT Infrastructure, can assist in that governance. This book is not an implementation guide for GRC products rather it shows you how those products participate in the governance process, how they introduce or mitigate risk, and how they can be brought into compliance with best practice, as well as applicable laws and regulations.

The book is divided into three major sections:Governance — where we discuss the strategic management of the enterprise, setting plans for managers, making disclosures to investors, and ensuring that the board knows that the enterprise is meeting its goals and staying within its policies.

Risk Management — where we discuss audit disciplines. This is where we work out what can go wrong, document what we have to do to prevent it from going wrong and check that what we think prevents it going wrong — actually works! We move through the various sub-disciplines within the audit profession and show what tools are best suited from within the Oracle family to assist.

Compliance Management — where we map the tools and facilities that we have discovered in the first two sections to frameworks and legislations. We give this from an industry and geography agnostic viewpoint, and then drill into some specific industries and countries.

We neither stay in the narrow definition of GRC applications, nor limit ourselves to the Business Applications but take you to the most appropriate places in the full Oracle footprint. The book is written from the perspective of big GRC. It is not an implementation manual for the GRC products, although we hope you can get the best out of the GRC products after reading this book. We discuss many applications and technology products that are not in the GRC product family.

Approach

The book is not organized by product, rather by the governance and risk assurance processes. A given product may be represented in multiple places within the book and a given process may contain multiple product references.

To ensure that we keep ourselves grounded in real problems, the book is written as a journal of a fictional company establishing its governance processes. It will introduce managers and directors responsible for various aspects of the governance, risk and compliance problem and where that problem is exposed and how it is addressed in the technology and business applications.

Who this book is for

The audience for this book is the people that advise the board, the internal audit department and CIO office on controls, security and risk assurance. Consultants that are implementing Financials or GRC Applications who wish to gain an understanding of the Governance Risk and Compliance processes, and how they are represented in Oracle, should find it a useful primer. Risk Assurance professionals will find it a reliable companion.

Governance, Risk, and Compliance Handbook for Oracle Applications