A management system to complement Sarbanes-Oxley?

We're six years into the Sarbanes-Oxley era, and much of the corporate community has made peace with the law. Many companies have gone a few steps beyond the letter of the law to synergize compliance efforts with strategic efforts. But as we head into 2009, there is a lot of talk about the a new era of regulation.

Much of the talk revolves around the credit crisis, especially as it relates to financial services firms and hedge funds. The common view now is that Congress is gearing up to propose a whole new set of regulations that would indeed constitute a new era. We're seeing a lot of commentary about the lessons of Sarbox in this regard. (Sarbox was never designed to prevent the kind of fraud, such as the Madoff scandal, we've seen on Wall Street recently).  

This is all understandable and appropriate, but another strand of "beyond Sarbox" thinking concerns complementary management governance systems. Moving beyond Sarbox in this sense would mean merging the aims of Sarbox--fraud prevention, financial integrity and the like--with larger aims that affect the entire business. The AMA describes it as "a system that provides direction for achievement of the three Rs of business; i.e., everyone doing the Right things, and doing them Right, at the Right time." 

The American Management Association has thrown its weight behind an idea called Integrated Enterprise Excellence, developed by Smarter Solutions of Austin, TX. The system aims to integrate "healthy policy creation with scorecards, strategic planning, business improvement, and controls." The goal is to pull together "every element required to understand, control and guide a business toward established strategies and goals."

And at least one company, Oracle Packaging, has had great success with it. 

It may seem a little TQM-ish and Six Sigma-ish, but it seems to go beyond mere production. In some ways, the sort of scorecards and dashboards elements it create fulfills the promise of Sarbox--and GRC and even ERM--as a strategic tool. We'll see if such thinking catches on. - Jim