I have been involved in 6 different Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) implementation projects as a consultant, out of which three clients went for a tool based SOX implementation project. In each case, my client spent more than USD 150,000 to procure a web based SOX tool from a leading Sarbanes-Oxley tool vendor. In all three cases, the SOX project team ended up spending inexcusable amount of time feeding data/documents and maintaining the Internal Controls structures into the tool. Finally the clients gave up, they stopped using the tool, and went back to Excel sheets and Word documents. The tool implementation failed. This has moved me to analyze the leading vendors of Sarbanes-Oxley tool and come up with conditions where the tool implementation can fail. I am myself shocked by the results of the analysis. None of the top tool vendors have a fully workable product. It seems in the rush of Sarbanes-Oxley craze, the vendors offered poorly designed solutions to the market, without carrying out a thorough requirement analysis.
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