Rich de Moll, vice president of finance and employee transformation at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, says many of the Sarbanes-Oxley returns will be soft benefits, items that can't be quantitatively measured. "Sarbanes will provide better information to decision makers," such as real-time statistics on sales and inventory, says de Moll. "But that's harder to measure."

Hagerty says companies using Sarbanes-Oxley to refine processes and to simplify infrastructure through hardware and software consolidation should be able to produce a return.

For instance, standardizing business processes worldwide could allow a company to cut workers and share services across divisions for a savings of as much as 30%, according to AMR.

One big initiative we have under way is to expand the utility of our operations networks. As a transaction hits our network, we'd like to provide more value-add: more fraud analytics, more utility in terms of who the cardholder is to potentially provide awards recognition so that things can begin to come to life at point of sale for merchants around the world.

An interesting anti-stupid network idea.