Take a big picture view of information

It has become something of a cliché that Sarbanes-Oxley has led companies to embrace more sophisticated reporting infrastructures to provide access to more detailed transactions in real time. But there are times when it pays to take a global look. Too often, we see the issues in terms of discrete solutions. There are some thorny issues that all IT and finance executives have to be aware of when assessing their information environment. A principal in Deloitte Consulting's Information Dynamics unit notes a host of problems: Too many instances of copied data, the latency of such data and the availability of data at different points in time in its lifecycle. Among the biggest issues is that many companies have overtasked their enterprise information systems. Column