Friday, January 3, 2014

We cover Corporate Information Compliance and data warehousing.
Corporate Information Compliance is a legal compliance. Some examples are Sarbanes Oaxley, Basel II, and HIPAA.  These compliance rules were brought about because corporations engaged in accounting fraud such as Enron, WorldCom and global crossings. The Sarbanes Oaxley Act for instance was introduced to enforce proper and honest accounting.
Data warehouse plays an important role in these compliance. When a compliance is implemented, it is done with financial transactions and corporate communications. The financial transactions are subjected to completeness, legitimacy of routing/classification and then separated into past and present data The past data makes it way to the Data warehouse. On the corporate communications side, the communications and compliance terms and phrases are fed into a sorter that builds a word phrase context and together with a simple index and actual messages are pushed into the data warehouse.
The two basic activities for the corporations are
to comply with financial requirements and controls and
to comply with organizational communications aspect of regulation.
Financial compliance deals with recording, procedures and reporting of financial transactions.  These translate to a whole set of approvals and formalization of procedures that corporations usually had never encountered.  The compliance would scrutinize not just at the micro level but at the macro level. The financial transactions must be cared for at both the micro and the macro levels.
Most corporations start with the present aspect of the financial transactions audit. They use mini-audits up front to make sure the systems comply. Once the audit and the procedures are finished, the data makes its way into the warehouse.
However the compliance requires looking at past data. Since the warehouse holds the historical data, granular data, and integrated data, it becomes useful for financial auditing.  When looked at broadly the corporate finances deals with the two aspects of what and why.
The what is answered by the details of all financial transactions - amount, from, date, control number, classification etc.  Questions such as whether all transactions are included, are the transactions recorded at the lowest level of granularity, is the relevant information for each financial transaction recorded properly ? is the recording accurate and have the transactions been classified ? are covered.
The one difference between data stored for compliance and the data for warehouse is that the former is seldom used but both are large.
Another difference is that the data for compliance cannot be lost because the audits are always needed. The data in the warehouse doesn't have that much sensitivity to loss.
Another differences is the responsiveness to queries. For warehouse the query responsiveness can range widely. For audit queries, these are usually completed in days.
Yet another difference between data warehouse data and data stored for compliance is content. The length of time that compliance data needs to be stored depends on legislations, company comfort, and physical storage.
The why of the financial transactions are about activities that take place before a transaction occurs.  These include things such as proposals, commitments, terms, delivery and guarantee.


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