Reckoning Legislative Compliances with Service Oriented Architecture A Proposed Approach

Recent accounting scandals involving firms such as such as Enron, Worldcom, Tyco etc. have resulted in the emergence of stringent regulations aimed at safeguarding the interest of enterprise stakeholders. Important regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the US PATRIOT act in US and the International Accounting Standards (IAS) regulation in Europe have diverse and far reaching effects. Organizations are mandated to comply with these regulations by producing certain documents and reports during the audit. This calls for appropriate extensible document lifecycle management solutions involving integration and reconciliation of stored data from heterogeneous sources with quick detailing. This is because these regulations demand easy accessibility of data. While point solutions to document life cycle management exist, they are not cost effective. The paradigm of service oriented architecture (SOA) which emphasizes software development based on well abstracted services has presented application development and adaptation a new dimension. SOA enables flexible deployment of shared reusable compliance services thereby yielding malleable and cost effective compliance solutions. In this paper, we provide a logical SOA based approach for achieving compliance in enterprises and illustrate this approach for a typical compliance need