CFO vs. CIO: Can This Marriage Be Saved?

CIO Magazine, normally what I would characterize as a publication with a somewhat retiring approach to matters, headlines on this month's cover, "The Sarbox Conspiracy."  Who's conspiring against whom?

A brief historic detour, first:  When F500's and their like began implementing ERP [enterprise resource planning] systems in the '80's and '90's, they were IT installations subsequently "owned" by IT, and the CIO thus usurped many critical financial controls from the purview of the CFO.  Now, the playing field may be reversing:  The "dark agenda" is that CIOs "fear Sarbox has become a stalking-horse that CFOs are using to assert control over IT and displace the CIO as the company's business process expert."  Perhaps an alarmist view, but it's hard not to sympathize with the CFO who asks, "'Who signs on the bottom line?,' his voice shaking with emotion."

Boys and girls, please....   As I've ventured before, there's a way to make lemonade out of this, and General Counsels and outside firms should be leading the way.  Think of this as an opportunity to competitively distinguish yourself from everybody else piling into the Sarbox-compliance arena.  It may be the case today, as an AMR survey reportedly found, that 74% of Sarbox compliance efforts are being led by finance and only 4% by IT, but the remainder are apparently led largely by legal.  I believe that percentage should be far higher.

Why?  Not because of lawyers' superior business insight or analytic acuity—not even because, lest we forget, Sarbox is a law—but because the salient risk a Sarbox compliance-failure poses is primarily to the enterprise.  I do not mean to minimize the human reality of criminal liability for the CEO and CFO, but let's also recognize that they have now taken those jobs eyes-open to such an eventuality.  I insist, instead, on the enterprise's self-interest as the guiding lens through which Sarbox compliance must be contemplated and executed.  And what is a more appropriate domain for the General Counsel and critical outside counselors?

For the plain fact is, as the article in a more temperate moment notes, that "Sarbanes-Oxley means CIOs and CFOs need each other more than ever."  The Sarbox opportunity is to move intellectually and conceptually beyond the perils and menaces of failing-to-comply, and to seize the chance to move a corporation's internal financial and data controls to a new plane of reliability, assured integrity, and end-to-end transparency.  Let enlightened outside counsel lead the way.