Earlier this year, Ian Cooke (a group IT audit manager with the Irish Post Office) wrote an article in the ISACA Journal calling all IT Auditors to seek out was to innovate in how they approach conducting IT audits. He highlights that business leaders are constantly trying to innovate out in the organization, but that Internal Auditors aren’t looking for ways to mirror that innovation. He goes on to suggest 10 ways that IT auditors can be innovative throughout the audit process. Here are a few of my favorites:
- Use Audit Management Software to standardize the approach to each audit and drive consistency in results. (By the way, Protiviti can help with this.)
- Utilize Data Analytics earlier. I’ve still only seen data analytics applied on a few audits, but there is clearly a value here. Ian suggests that we not just use analytics in the fieldwork stage (i.e. looking for issues in large datasets) but also in the planning stages. This makes sense to me, if we can get access to data in advance of an audit, analytics can be used to look for anomalies that could suggest risks to be audited.
- Get Primary Access to the Evidence. All to often, audits are slowed down because the auditor must reach out to others to gain access to appropriate evidence. I’ve seen significant improvement in audit speed (allowing greater value add analysis) when the audit team is given direct, read-only access to the systems and data they are auditing.
- Use video. (This one is probably my favorite suggestion.) Ian suggests that auditors could use video executive summaries to better communicate audit findings to executive management.
Comments are closed.