» Chapter 8 in An Architecture for Enterprise Business Intelligence offers further insights on security and it’s importance to safeguarding information assets. This 367-page document is an outstanding complimentary resource to help CIOs, IT professionals, business managers, and academics understand, appreciate and evaluate enterprise-class business intelligence software. Corporate Governance Data
Corporate governance data is any information collected, organized, and stored that organizations use to attest to conducting business operations in accordance with applicable governmental laws and regulations. Corporate governance data includes all the key financial and operational metrics that accurately describe a company’s on-going health in its market.
Increasingly important since the passing of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, corporate governance data is essential in demonstrating that management properly stewards an organization's assets. Globally, nations and economic communities are creating, evolving, and adopting policies such as the Basel II Accord that demand proper controls are firmly established that ensure operational transparency. While most laws and regulations target public corporations, private, governmental, and non-profit organizations recognize that investing the necessary resources into corporate governance data actually helps an organization’s effectiveness and community reputation.
Corporate Governance Data Requirements
Corporate governance data is essential for risk and compliance professionals, internal and external auditors, executive management, and the Board of Directors to understand operational performance, regulatory compliance, and risk. As a natural consequence, organizations are requiring managers and even front-line employees to be conscious of and participate in discovering out-of-compliance situations and corporate risk. As the number of people involved significantly expands so too do the requirements upon internal corporate governance data systems. These requirements include the following:
- Present corporate governance data in understandable fashion using reports, dashboards, thresholds, alerts
- Conduct investigative analysis through atomic level data
- Scale to the ever increasing number of users
- Provide consistent metric definitions to ensure a single version of the truth
- Secure the data and metrics across all diverse users
- Audit application changes and usage
Corporate Governance Data and MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy business intelligence (BI) software transforms corporate governance data into BI applications for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). BI GRC applications give everyone from the Board of Directors to the front-line decision makers the information necessary to make sound business decisions. Furthermore, MicroStrategy BI addresses the pressing requirements for corporate governance data applications:
Data Presentation – Dashboards, Enterprise Reports, Cross Tabular
MicroStrategy BI software presents corporate governance data in an easy to understand formats including dynamic dashboards, enterprise reports, cross tabular grids and charts.
- Dashboards provide excellent monitoring capabilities
- Enterprise Reports provide densely-packed, well-organized detail data
- Cross Tabular grids and charts provide highly interactive environments for data analysis.
Investigation – Drill Anywhere
MicroStrategy BI applications offer unparalleled data investigation through the largest data volumes, which is critical for scouring corporate governance data. MicroStrategy let’s you drill anywhere through the data, not just up and down, to find relationships and conduct root-issue analysis. Additionally, you can add calculations and metrics; conduct time-series analysis; pivot, page-by, sort, and filter data to discover and understand your corporate governance data.
User Scalability
MicroStrategy’s BI architecture is specifically designed to scale to the largest number of uses using multi-layered caching, clustering, load balancing, and true 64-bit compliant code. MicroStrategy boasts some of the largest in-production BI applications from well-known customers, instilling confidence that your corporate governance data BI application will meet the needs all your constituents.
Consistent Governance Metrics
MicroStrategy uses a single definition for every metric ensuring consistency in every report and dashboard. Any change to a metric automatically changes everyplace it is used, ensuring a single version of the truth at all times.
Security
With more employees accessing sensitive data, it is imperative to security access to data and even individual metrics. MicroStrategy provides Access Control to individual metrics and data creating a comprehensive and centrally controlled security policy. Deploying corporate governance data applications widely is only possible with this level of security sophistication.
Accountability
Governmental regulations demand corporate governance data applications provide clear accountability about changes. MicroStrategy provides the ability to track changes to individual metrics and reports for auditing purposes.