The auditing realm has been historically laden with an abundance of excessive communication and manual work. So what can we expect of the future?
Data Intelligence Maturity
Data intelligence has made impressive strides in the last 10 years, both in underlying approaches, and technologies leveraged. It is becoming easier to join and drill into larger data sets, and compile isolated pieces of information to create more value yield. It is not simply a proposition about better underlying data, it is also about meta intelligence to wade through that data in an accelerated manner, identifying problems, enhancing quality, and sharpening the time taken to build foundational rules - critical in large enterprises.
Accelerators and approaches to derive this intelligence are equally scalable into the world of Audit. This presents opportunity to drive better accuracy, reduce costs, and reduce timelines.
Technological Accelerators
The concept of accelerators continues to grow. Accelerators reduce time and effort , hence the name, and take both technical and non technical forms. The real value of technological accelerators are that they provide a trusted 'repeat of use process' to achieve a 'repeatable outcome'. They also advance and enforce key intellectual property constructs to become more standardized which influences consistent, qualitative outcomes.
The reach of accelerators in audit has serious untapped potential, from overall approach, to tactical execution. With a lightweight investment being typical with the right design thinking, audit teams can enhance agility and flexibility without incurring heavy costs that outweigh benefits.
Robotic Process Automation
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has an enormous value proposition within audit. The burden of data gathering and processing can be shifted notably towards RPA, so that humans can focus on decision making and audit quality. This increases productivity with a 24 hour clock, as RPA can quickly process work on demand and can scale to almost any requirement or workload.
RPA is also smart enough to perform intelligent levels of QA and validation. Senior team members or noted specialists no longer become a bottleneck or become overworked and swamped. Especially given that consistent portions of their workloads do not actually require their expertise or skills, and could have been delegated.
Advanced Forms Of Workflows
Workflows are critical for not only coordination of tasks but for doing so across roles within audit teams. Workflows no longer are limited to a single platform either and platforms are also becoming more extensible. This decreases manual effort, communication time, communication and workflow bottlenecks, and process scaling.
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
The notable aspect of machine learning and artificial intelligence is that the space is simply becoming more mature. This is reducing barriers to accessibility and functional pathways are becoming more widely applicable. Audits can benefit from proactively anticipating risks, gathering and managing lessons learned in real time, finding mistakes, or checking for regulatory compliance issues against structured and unstructured data, as just some of a few examples.
Machine learning and AI can both help to develop better data as we all self-enhance as a result of better data. It is also expected that producing sound results on this frontier in a commercially beneficial manner will generate substantial strategic benefit, eminence and practical value.
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