OCTOBER 2019CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM9fieldwork activities coupled with the challenges that most audit organizations face with effectiveness and efficiency along with the constraint of having limited resources, how will internal audit organizations continue to add value? Organizations must automate to remain relevant.I'll touch on a few areas that I believe are high value areas in the internal audit function that could benefit from automation.Continuous Risk Assessment ­ Internal Audit organizations must find a way to not rely solely on interviews and surveys, which are highly subjective as the only data point inputs to their risk assessment process which is typically done once a year. Use Data Analytics to leverage data points that should also include objective information around financial trends, known gaps or control weaknesses, non-compliance, security, and reputational and operational metrics that are being monitored continuously.Advisory Services - Internal Audit organizations must provide more advisory services to the business. These services should include guidance on process improvements, control design, special projects, recommendations for corrective actions, and industry best practices and frameworks that can be leveraged. Internal audit can help identify opportunities to embed automation-enabled control activities into business processes and functions. The results of such engagements should lead to productive and beneficial change in the organization and lead to more effective and efficient audits. Control Optimization - Internal Audit organizations must execute an exercise to streamline controls by rationalizing key control activities, reducing redundancy, eliminating unnecessary controls, identifying opportunities for automation, and properly aligning controls to financial statement assertions. The completion of these activities will lead to an increase in external auditor reliance, a reduction of performance costs, and an improvement of audit effectiveness and efficiency. Agile Auditing ­ Internal Audit organizations must adopt an agile auditing approach. The approach is not necessarily from the perspective of following the Agile Methodology to the letter by having a scrum master, daily scrums, a Kanban board, and sprints. Although you can adapt all of these activities to fit your specific needs, but the auditing approach should be taken from the perspective of having a continuous risk assessment in place and a reserve of hours in the audit plan to audit things that are trending negatively on the risk assessment dashboards immediately. Data Analytics (DA) - Internal Audit organizations must leverage Data Analytics to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of audit operations as well as provide valuable insights to the business. Leveraging Data Analytics in the audit process is imperative. Data Analytics increases the audit department's ability to test complete populations of data without having to employ sampling techniques. For the Internal Audit function to remain relevant and increase its value proposition it must begin to capitalize on intelligent automation. The time is now. For the Internal Audit function to remain relevant and increase its value proposition it must begin to capitalize on intelligent automation
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