Embracing Data Analytics: A Strategic Imperative for Audit and Risk Management

Brace yourself and embrace data analytics while there’s still opportunity because it is here to stay.

I just want to pose a few questions which i think will help realize the power of data driven audit or risk analysis.

1. Do you have a working data analytics strategy to help with your audits or at least plan to?
2. To what extent is the strategy working for you?
3. What is the biggest challenges your organization is facing to having a fully fledged working strategy?

Lets try answer these questions.

I believe if you cannot measure something it is very difficult to stop, improve or even prove that its happening. When you use data to substantiate your finding and most importantly quantify the magnitude of its impact to the business objective. You already have exposed the gap in the process and the c-suit will begin to rely on your work because you have told a story with actionable insight.

There’s already tools in the industry that you can use to achieve a lot with analytics and if you have not even began to introduce a strategy in your organization, you are soon to be irrelevant.

1. Start by building capacity within your team and look at relatively simple test. When a process is repeatable, that is an opportunity for automation. Already you have saved up time to allow your resources focus on important strategic projects. You begin telling a complete story of what is happening in your organization because you would be looking at 100% of the population.
2. Most of the time organization do understand the power of analytics and always preach the value from it but they haven’t not really realized return on investment themselves. It is high time that we start putting down actionable items to help drive the theoretical strategy we claim we have. You need to start small and gradually grow your coverage and overtime you will start realizing the value in using analytics.
3. From my experience I have noticed quite a number of challenges that are typically common across organizations. Lack of skills, selection of the right tool, data access, data security in transit and data storage security etc.

In God we trust and everyone else must bring data “stollen”