March 8, 2007

9:50 AM - 10:50 AM

Level: Introductory/All Levels

As companies react to the rapidly changing regulatory environment and work to mitigate risk, audits have become a frequent tactic for monitoring compliance. Internal and external audits, as well as regulatory investigations, regardless of purpose, ask similar questions. Whether for SAS 70, Sarbanes-Oxley, or legal investigation, nearly every auditor within your organization seeks the same thing – metadata. But do those companies who spend thousands on audits place the same monetary value on metadata management? Drawing on nearly a decade of experience in the healthcare and financial sectors, Bill will not only help you learn ways to educate your organization about the value of metadata in an audit, but also how to find metadata that is already in the budget (one clue: it won’t be called metadata) and align your IT objectives with the organization’s business in an effective and mutual beneficial way.

Attendees will learn:

• How auditors’ investigations relate to metadata management
• Ways to demonstrate metadata’s cost-benefit to the audit process
• Ways to adapt to the language and goals of the business without losing focus on metadata
• How to learn from your executives what they already know about metadata
• How to find hidden metadata initiatives in the budget and corporate initiatives
  

Bill Brooks has been modeling, managing and integrating data since 1995, beginning at CID Associates developing application databases, then at Children’s Hospital Boston as manager of the Decision Support Systems Group. He managed a team of Informatica integration developers at MFS for several years, and now manages integration systems in Regulatory Systems, Global Investment Technology, and Corporate Finance.

Bill’s background includes traditional relational database design, data warehouse design and implementation, and enterprise application integration using a variety of ETL, message broker and recently, service bus and SOA approaches. Bill has worked with auditors in a variety of contexts in healthcare and in finance, designed and implemented compliance policies and systems, and architected numerous projects to improve metadata availability in addition to meeting their primary goals.