Prism
IT governance and executive assurance
PRISM.
Your teams send the monthly templates. PRISM sends the board pack.
PRISM turns the status reports your delivery leads already write into checked, consistent packs for the board, the CFO, the COO and the CIO. It flags any color the evidence does not support, and it never becomes a second source of truth.
Live demo · read only
See the real dashboards in two minutes
- 1Open prism.opey.org and sign in with:
testuserPasswordtestuser5!- 2You land on the Executive Dashboard.
- 3Use the PRISM menu on the left: Command Centre, Board View, Finance, Operations, Assurance, Portfolio and Compliance. The period selector at the top shows history.
A fictional sample portfolio. Nothing can be changed. Best on a laptop or tablet; works on a phone.
What PRISM is
Three promises to the executive team
Time back every month, a pack the board can trust, and one version of the truth.
Time
The pack builds itself
The days spent chasing, pasting and formatting at every month end become a few commands and a review. Your delivery leads keep writing the report they write today, and nobody rebuilds the deck.
Trust
The pack checks itself
Every reported color is tested against the evidence. A green project sixty days behind baseline is flagged, too little reporting cannot pass as a position, and a pack with blocking defects will not publish.
Truth
One master for every number
Your system of record stays the master for money and structure. PRISM adds only what nobody else holds, such as status, risks and decisions, and hands its figures back as a file your finance team loads through its own controls.
Time saved
The monthly cycle, without the scramble
The real alternative to PRISM is not another platform. It is doing the whole cycle by hand again next month. Here is each step, side by side.
| The monthly step | By hand today | With PRISM |
|---|---|---|
| Collecting updates | Emails, reminders, chasing late reports. | Teams upload the same monthly template. Reporting coverage is shown on every view, and missing reports are flagged. |
| Consolidating | Copy and paste into a master spreadsheet. Version conflicts. | Every submission is validated on upload and lands in one dataset, entered once. |
| Checking the numbers | Whoever builds the deck, if they have time. | Reported status is compared with the evidence. Optimistic colors are flagged, not smoothed over. |
| Spotting what matters | Buried on slide seventeen. | Overdue decisions, blocked dependencies and red items surface first in the Command Centre. |
| The board pack | Days of formatting. A new deck every month. | Board, CFO, COO and CIO packs generated in PDF, PowerPoint, Excel and Word from one dataset. |
| Partial reporting | Presented as if complete. | A coverage floor stops a total being shown as the position when too few items have reported. |
| Regulatory exposure | Tracked separately, or not at all. | Obligations such as GDPR, SEC cyber rules and NIS2 derived from each country footprint, with statutory clocks tracked. |
| History and audit | Last month’s deck in someone’s inbox. | Every period kept, every change recorded in a tamper evident audit trail. |
Your teams’ reporting effort stays the same. The assembly work in the middle column is what disappears. Put your own numbers on it
How PRISM compares
Four ways to report IT to a board
Every IT organization already uses one of these. Here is how they differ on the questions an executive team actually asks.
| The question | PRISMGovernance and assurance layer | Spreadsheets and decksThe manual monthly cycle | BI dashboardsCharts over a data model | Enterprise portfolio suitesA platform for every project |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What do my teams have to change? | No new tool. One generated Excel template for the report they already write. | Nothing, but someone rekeys every report. | Feed a data model that someone has to build. | Learn and keep a new tool up to date. |
| How soon is the first board pack? | The first monthly cycle. | Every month, rebuilt by hand. | After the data pipelines are built. | After an implementation program. |
| Does it become a second source of truth? | No. One master per field. Figures go back to your system of record. | Yes. Many copies, by design. | Another copy, refreshed on a schedule. | Often, unless fully integrated. |
| Is the reported status checked? | Yes. Against evidence, with a coverage floor and a quality gate. | Only if the deck builder has time. | No. It charts what it is fed. | Varies. Mostly the reported status. |
| Are board, CFO, COO and CIO packs produced? | Generated in PDF, PowerPoint, Excel and Word. | Built by hand. | Screens; exports set up per audience. | Configurable reports, set up per audience. |
| Are regulatory obligations tracked by country? | Derived from each program’s footprint, with clocks. | No. | No. | Rarely in scope. |
| Where does the data live? | Your servers. Works air gapped. No phone home. | Wherever the files were emailed. | Usually the vendor’s cloud. | Mostly the vendor’s cloud. |
| What does it really cost? | A self hosted license. No per user fees. | Hidden: senior time, every month. | Per user subscriptions plus data engineering. | Per user subscriptions plus an integration partner. |
Typical of each category, not a statement about any single product. Many organizations keep their portfolio suite or BI tool and add PRISM as the assurance layer above it.
The question every CIO asks first
Will this become another source of truth?
No. Your system of record, whether SAP, Oracle or a finance workbook, stays the master. PRISM sits between it and your teams, and the numbers flow back to it every month.
Your system of record
The master for budgets, actuals, cost centres and project codes. Unchanged.
PRISM
Holds only what nobody else holds: status, risks, decisions, dependencies and milestones. Adds the assurance verdict and produces the executive packs.
Divisions and projects
Fill in the status report they already write, once a month.
Value to every seat at the table
One dataset. Every executive. One answer each.
Each lens is drawn from the same validated submissions, so no two views can disagree and no meeting starts by deciding which number is right.
Board
“Is what we are being told true?”
The assurance gap: what was reported, what the project’s own dates and figures support, and the facts behind any difference.
CEO
“Which decisions are holding us back?”
Decisions ranked by cost of delay in the board pack, with owners and due dates. An overdue decision drives status.
CFO
“Where is the money going, and does it reconcile?”
Budget, forecast, actual and committed by division and cost centre, keyed to your ERP codes and exported back to it.
COO
“What will break operations next quarter?”
Milestones, critical dependencies and the delivery position across every country you run in.
CIO and CTO
“Where are we exposed?”
Technology risk, assurance gaps by division and the regulatory duties each rollout adds.
Trust
Assurance, not just reporting
PRISM surfaces the difference rather than burying it, before the pack reaches the room.
“On track.”
Sixty days behind baseline.
A coverage floor stops an aggregate being presented as a position on too little data, and a quality gate refuses to publish a pack with blocking defects. That is the line a board can stand behind when it asks how you know.
Sovereign by design
Your servers. Your data. Every country.
The same principle that runs through When Clouds Fail and When Agents Rule. You hold the keys, you hold the data, and nothing phones home.
Self hosted
Runs on your infrastructure: cloud, on premises, or fully air gapped, with offline verifiable licensing.
Least privilege
Board members see the board view and nothing else. Delivery leads see and submit only their own items.
Tamper evident audit
A hash chained record of who did what, verified automatically.
Every country, one roll up
Delivery, cost and risk across the whole footprint, with any market one click away when a director asks.
Obligations by jurisdiction
Record where a program runs and PRISM derives the duties that follow, across 45 and more countries.
No lock in
Everything exports in open formats. Your data stays yours if you ever leave.
Built on a platform you know
PRISM runs on WordPress, PHP and MySQL or MariaDB on Linux. Your team hosts, patches and backs it up like any other server.
Proven, not promised
Every command in the manuals is tested against a live install before it is written down, and every release runs its own self test.
See it before you buy
The live demo is the real software on a fictional portfolio. Sign in as testuser and judge for yourself.
One body of work, three tiers
The books set the thesis. The toolkit gives you the instruments. PRISM is where the frameworks run.
The books
When Clouds Fail and When Agents Rule. The board level argument for sovereignty, resilience and governance.
The toolkit
The Sovereignty Clock, the A.R.T. assessment, the regulatory registers and more. The templates a leader uses to act.
PRISM
The living system that carries the frameworks into everyday governance, and gives the board a view it can trust.
See it now, then see it on your own portfolio
Sign in to the live demo today as testuser. When you are ready, request a test instance: it loads your real portfolio and produces a board pack in the first monthly cycle.
About the author
Steve Oppenheim is the author of When Clouds Fail and When Agents Rule, and the voice behind the Sovereign CIO body of work on cloud sovereignty, resilience and AI governance for enterprise technology leaders.
Across twenty five years of CIO and CTO leadership he has run technology at global scale, from a large defense technology profit and loss in cleared environments to a global divestiture at one of the major professional services firms. PRISM is the platform expression of that work: the governance and assurance layer he wanted every board he served to have.