In this blog, I provide you with a couple of examples of how a Customer can use Oracle CCG 5.5.1 to reduce IT expenses:
Responding to Requests from External Auditors
Customer’s IT staff spends a significant amount of time each year responding to requests from its external auditors for information that the external auditors need to complete their review of Customer’s Internal Controls and audit of Customer’s Financial Statements. Many of these requests require Customer’s IT staff to answer questions regarding the configuration of the Oracle Financial applications and changes to these configuration parameters.
Currently, the IT staff generally writes and/or executes multiple queries to provide the documentation required by its external auditors. This is a very time consuming task and diverts IT resources from performing their core activities.
Customer’s IT staff can minimize the time required to respond to requests from their external auditors and spend more time working on their core activities by using Oracle CCG to provide the external auditors with snapshot definition occurrences generated on a specific date and time and compare them with the same snapshot definitions generated on a subsequent date and time to quickly identify the differences in configuration parameters between the two snapshot definitions. Similarly, Customer’s IT staff and generate Change Tracking Details for one or more application configuration objects to provide its external auditors with a detailed history of all changes made to these objects during a specific period of time. This functionality can significantly reduce the time it takes the IT staff to manually create and generate the queries required to provide this information to the auditors.
Performing IT Security and Compliance Activities
Customer’s IT Security and Compliance Team can save time completing their security and compliance activities by comparing snapshot definitions with “baseline” snapshot definitions to ensure continued compliance with the approved “baseline”. Similarly, this team can generate Change Tracking Details reports to ensure that all changes have been process properly using the approve Change Management Procedures.
Currently, the IT Security and Compliance Team must employ manual methods to identify the differences between the actual configuration parameters and the approved “baseline”. Moreover, the current process to identify the individual changes to “baseline” configuration parameters is a very time consuming manual process.
