At one point in my career I worked right across the street from Enron. I used to pass the big E on the sidewalk as I made my way to the account I was working on. Like most of us, the fall of Enron surprised and angered me.

One consequence of the Enron scandal and other accounting irregularities was the creation of the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. This set of rules requires major corporations to ensure that their board is knowledgeable and aware of all of the ramifications of its financial position. It also makes the board members responsible and liable for financial proceedings within the company.

Accomplishing this task is no easy matter, especially for large corporations with multiple divisions and diverse management. Information that comprises corporate balance statements resides in hundreds of computer systems, none of which were designed with compliance in mind.

Which is where Web services comes to the rescue. The bad news of Sarbanes-Oxley is that the information required has to be very current - it can't take a year to put it together, it has to be timely. All of the old processes for generating corporate financial reports have to be sped up somehow. Web services promises to address this by removing the major cause of delay - impedance mismatch.

Accounting follows strict rules (well, okay, sometimes accountants play fast and loose with these rules, hence the Enron scandal, but the rules themselves are fairly straightforward). These rules allow accountants to produce standard reports (like a balance sheet) from myriad different sources. The problem that gives the accountants, and the systems guys, fits is trying to match up and correlate, federate, and aggregate data in different packages with different formats.

If this seems like a simple problem, think again. Even something as straightforward as a date can be problematic. Sybase, Oracle, DB2, and other databases all have different formats for dates. And SQL has been around over 30 years and has a standards body regulating it. Now imagine what it's like to try to get multiple accounting packages, ERP systems, management dashboards, and employee portals all pointed in the same direction and providing the same information. Most companies can't even come up with a single view of their customers. In some ways it's amazing that a balance sheet can be produced at all.

So the ability to remove many of these problems, assist in the mapping and correlations, and transform data from one format to another is a big aid in creating a timely flow of information. Of course, there's more to it than just compliance management. As a matter of course the improvements that occur as a result of compliance requirements flow not just to the board room, but to the bottom line. The ability to see deeper into the financial status of a corporation allows management to make realistic decisions and ideally helps to head off crises such as those that caused the accounting scandals.

But it's not just the board that benefits from system updates in the form of more timely financial information. The work necessary to implement better compliance management provides dividends in many systems areas. The ability to transform and begin to reduce the number of disparate views of things like customers and orders leads to shorter lead times and quicker fulfillment cycles - all benefits to the company and to the bottom line.

Web services won't solve all of the world's problems, whether we're talking about compliance management, order to cash cycles, or world peace (or alternatively, whirled peas). There's real work required to figure out what needs to be done with Web services capabilities, how best to expose services, and how to most efficiently combine them. Web services is a piece of the puzzle, but good design is still needed as well.