Will need of Document Administration ProcedureDMS

Document Administration or Organization Info Administration is perhaps one of the more critical with the online content management system organization solutions that may give an answer to the a variety of prerequisites of SOX. Numerous sections of SOX have got a immediate bearing to the way through which the electronic documents/records in the enterprise are produced, reviewed, authorized, saved, retrieved, transferred, and destroyed.

Know-how Management: Document & Documents Administration

Estimates have been made calculating that a significantly large proportion (some say, more than 70%) with the documents owned by an organization are in electronic format and might never be seen in hardcopy.

According to Gartner's Editor in Chief James Lundy: Data administration will become a top 10 issue for many CIOs in the coming year.

In the following, we will discuss the different sections of SOX that a doc administration alternative might help in complying with.

SOX Sections:

Section 302: According to Section 302, the CEO and CFO have to personally certify the financial statements and disclosures made by the company on authenticity and accuracy. This requires a program in place which will make the CEO and the CFO confident that all the disclosures that the company makes are accurate and authentic. This can be done in two ways:

A person is to trickle-down the responsibility with the CEO and the CFO into the lower administration levels and in response bubble-up the sign-offs from the lower management levels on all files that are inputs to the company filings.

Second is to design comprehensive business processes that produce the company filings. The business processes will be designed in a very rigorous manner to comply with all the provisions and proper implementation and training of all the personnel related towards the business processes will be carried out and tested on a periodic basis. Further, the business processes themselves will be open to stringent internal audits that may be carried out from time to time.

One, or a combination of both these practices will go a long way towards ensuring proper compliance.

For both these options it is clear that a strong enterprise-wide doc administration method will give the foundation on which the compliance will actually be carried out. In the first case, the sign-offs can be configured using a workflow module with the document management system. In the second case, the business process itself will be configured in the document administration technique and all the relevant supporting or input documents too will be part in the DMS and appropriate subordination and linking will be done between the official company filings and all the input documents to it.

As proof on the information supporting the final company financials--as filed or reported--it is important to archive all the emails, excel sheets, instant messages or other communications and documents that were exchanged which led to a final certified filing by the CEO and CFO. This will safeguard the CxO's claim that all the financial reports are true to their know-how and due diligence was carried out before certifying the reports.

Section 404: The CEO and CFO will need to give a report assessing and certifying that the "internal controls" have been assessed and are working fine or that there are weaknesses and appropriate action is being taken. Complying with this requirement is one of the most difficult parts of SOX and requires a whole slew of people, processes and technologies. However, DMS has an significant role to play in this.

All the emails and attached paperwork in the chronological sequence will want to be archived for the purpose of proving that the internal controls are appropriate. Ideally, a workflow module will present added assurance that the internal controls are implemented.