课程: Building a Data-Driven Audit

What does "data-driven" really mean?

课程: Building a Data-Driven Audit

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What does "data-driven" really mean?

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- Almost every organization these days claims that they're data driven, but what does that really mean? Data-driven means making decisions based on data rather than emotion. On the other hand, there's an old saying, trust your gut, which some professionals like Malcolm Gladwell live by, but how weird would it be to just get in your car and start driving without having the data about where you're going and just trusting your gut to get you there? This is obviously an extreme example. This saying likely originated from that anxious feeling you get in your stomach when you know something isn't quite right. But you can actually use this to your advantage if you find the right balance of trusting your gut with data. Because even when you're using a data-driven approach, you still need to interpret the data, ask the right questions, and make the final calls. Let's look at an example of how one internal audit team successfully achieved this balance. An internal audit team found that one of the company's software development vendors was based nearby with a residential address, since it's pretty suspicious for a vendor to have a residential address, further investigation was conducted. Diving deeper, auditors were able to analyze that spending for that one vendor went from $2,000 per month to $20,000 per month and eventually increased to more than $100,000 monthly. This analysis not only helped identify the suspicious activity, but the team was also able to improve the accuracy and reliability of the company's vendor database. For an organization, what it really means to be data driven is to leverage data to be more efficient, make better predictions and catch issues before they turn into full blown problems. This is especially true for the audit function. Since they're in charge of making sure the organization is running like a well-oiled machine, there are different approaches you can take from the audit perspective to reach a level of being data-driven. The main goal here is to improve the audit process so that you're able to come to more accurate and meaningful conclusions to ultimately provide more value to the organization by helping improve its processes. Let's take a look at these different approaches.

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