Audit Compliance: Why solution from IBM Rational Software?

One of the major problems meeting compliance and regulatory mandates, especially in the financial industry, is establishing business controls required to ensure that all of the systems are audit ready. Within the IBM Software Group, Rational Software plays a crucial component providing a three-dimensional approach to Compliance. By implementing the three-dimensional approach to compliance, an organization will adopt a Process assuring Tracebility, which leads to Auditability and Standards.

	Three-Dimensions Approach to Compliance
	As companies grapple with the challenges being presented by each compliance many are turning to software as a vehicle to assist in obeying the law without adding staff. A common thread woven through each compliance is the need to have transaction processing clearly defined, understood, documented and tracked throughout the business application so that the rigid controls necessitated by the mandates are evident. Examples of this were seen in HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley and the Patriot act to name a few.
	1st Dimension: Requirements and Transaction Tracking
	Requirement and tracing alone is the entry point, but it is only through an established test plan that tests these processes and requirements that ensure these controls are in-place. The ability to map each and every requirement to a test case is essential in compliance verification. The IBM Rational Software Development platform offers complete requirements tracking from entry point through visual model association to mapping each requirement to a test case.
	2nd Dimension: Process and Change Management
	Next is the second dimension of the solution. Your controls and business transaction processes are in place, but how to prevent someone from making unwarranted changes to the process - ultimately leading to a break-down of the check-points and controls and eventually compliance violation? To avoid such a debacle you need to ensure that a well defined process is both in place and followed. An important part of that process is the ability to manage change within the application. The Software Development Platform provides the ability to coordinate and track the activities of team members ensuring that they work with the right set of assets, extending across the lifecycle, accommodating all project domain information - requirements, visual models, code and test artifacts, helping teams effectively baseline requirements in addition to code and test assets.
	3rd Dimension: Project Status Tracking, Quality and Documentation
	Communicating project information can be time consuming and difficult. Project lifecycle documentation and reports are often produced haphazardly or are neglected altogether because of the effort and time involved in creating and maintaining them. Rational SoDA helps overcomes these issues by automating the creation and maintenance of comprehensive project documentation and reports. Unlike manual methods, Rational SoDA® generates complete documentation more easily and with greater consistency automatically extracting data from various project tool databases.