The right combination for sustaining Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.(HEADLINE)

Take a deep breath and pat yourself on the back. Your company is compliant with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). Now, how do you stay there? Sustained SOX compliance is a journey, not a "once-and-done" effort. It takes the right combination of people, processes and technology to make the journey successful.

The first step is to harness the best people in the company to manage the sustainment effort. The goal should be to instill a culture of data quality within your company. Educate anyone who has contact with company data (read: everyone) on how important it is to maintain the data quality standards developed in the SOX compliance process. To this end, develop metrics for measuring data entry accuracy rates, and tie performance to incentives.

Next, evaluate your initial compliance methodology and fine-tune it to enable the sustainment effort. The trials and errors that went into developing your SOX compliance methodology should give you valuable insight into which data quality maintenance processes work best for your company. Examine your initial compliance processes to confirm that they can be reused--and tweaked, if need be--to enable you to monitor and sustain the compliance effort.

To augment the work of your people and processes, it's critical both to implement best-of-breed data management tools and to automate data management processes when possible. Because of time constraints, your initial SOX compliance effort may have entailed using your existing technical architecture. However, now that you are in compliance, it's time to re-evaluate that technical architecture. You need flexible, scalable data management (data quality, extraction, transformation and ...