Talent & Culture drive reform and innovation

Welcome back to our journey on exploring audit innovation. As work and production resume gradually across China, digital technologies are increasingly serving as the key force safeguarding the order of work. Before this, many industries have already started leveraging different applications and online platforms to drive remote working and keep the business running. In these extraordinary times, digital technologies of all sorts proliferate rapidly. New modes of work and thinking are unobtrusively changing our society.

Seeing these, I can't help going into deep thought and ponder whether thoughts or actions came first, and whether technologies lead to changes in mindset, or it is innovation culture that drives technological development. To find the answer, I have read through the annals of Deloitte, only to find that many pioneers have already been there during the 175 years of development of Deloitte. Our founder William Welch Deloitte, together with Deloitte boundary breakers of every gender, every background and every area of expertise, had long lightened up the torch of innovation as their mission to pass on the culture of innovative thinking from generation to generation.

Reform and innovation are always driven by talent and culture. Although Deloitte AI Robot is a product of the 21st century, its origin can be traced back to our people's innovation culture and courage to change mindsets over generations. Today, we have the courage to break the boundaries again by embracing audit innovation and transformation. Cultural change is an endless process to begin. Innovation culture is the seed we sowed along the path to audit innovation, which will gradually set the scene for cultivation, germination, rooting and growth along this journey.

Cultivation - A talent mechanism that focuses on professional capabilities and innovative mindsets

Au, Melinda

Partner, Audit & Assurance Talent leader, Deloitte China

Under the trend of technological innovation, Deloitte has embraced digitalization in many of its professional services. We will be needing more talent with backgrounds in science and engineering to join us. Every year, Deloitte China recruits fresh graduates worldwide and organizes open days for science and engineering students in different regions to help these talent understand the latest digital services, products and solutions offered by Deloitte.

With the increased demands for digital talent, we have entered into strategic cooperation with a number of key education institutions of science and engineering in the past two years. We have also added a dimension of assessment on the digital capability of candidates in our talent selection process.

Since 2017, Deloitte China has organized the Deloitte Digital Difference Camp on an annual basis. In 2019, we have attracted more than 10,000 students from all over the world to join the program. We aim to give students the opportunity to experience the latest technology and technical insights through online digital classes and leverage their digital experiences and expertise to solve complex business problems.

Lo, Vincent

Manager, Audit & Assurance Learning, Deloitte China

We offer colleagues in the Deloitte family with training programs related to innovation culture and digital thinking to help them grow into the future audit talent.

In audit innovation, our training focuses on two key areas: how to respond to challenges and opportunities arising from the disruption in the audit profession, and master the specific application of various emerging technologies in audit practice. In addition, we also place emphasis on cultivation of culture and mindsets. Built on Deloitte's 4+1 culture, we inspire people's creativity and create next-generation smart solutions and industry-leading insights to shape the audit of the future together.

To this end, we have organized over 50 "Transformation Excellence" and "Innovation Excellence" onsite training sessions for audit colleagues in 17 cities across China over the past year. These training sessions were delivered by senior trainers, with a total attendance of over 3,000 participants. In Hong Kong and Macau, we have also launched training on innovation culture and innovative mindsets, being the first of its kinds, for nearly 200 new hires. Over 97% of audit colleagues have obtained Deloitte's "Digital Transform University Accreditation". In 2020, we will continue to promote training on audit transformation and audit innovation to help each of us in the Deloitte family grow into an innovation elite. 

Germination - A change of mindsets towards enhancing traditional concepts and service models

Chan, Alan

Partner, Audit & Assurance, Deloitte China

The audit sector is facing rapid changes in internal and external environment, and so is our professional mindset. Innovation has changed the way we work, and taken audit reform to the next level. In the recent audit peak season, various innovative solutions and tools have not only significantly enhanced our audit efficiency, but also enabled our audit staff to continue to communicate with and remotely deliver services to our clients without interruption under the various limitations as a result of the epidemic.
 

Li, Victoria

Manager, Audit & Assurance, Deloitte China (Winner of 2019 Innovation Campaign)

Activate your creativity. We can all think big. Challenge innovation and align it with "practical needs" to embrace the future we anticipate. The Innovation Campaign encourages innovative ideas and turn them into reality to help us work faster and better.

Rooting - A way of work encompassing advanced technologies and standardized methods

Kang, Jun Meng

Manager, Audit & Assurance, Deloitte China

In the audit transformation journey, the innovation group focuses on applying cutting-edge digital technologies in the core audit process, and the engagement team actively embrace innovative thinking. They identify and evaluate standardized and automatable scenarios in daily work from the perspective of practical application, and proactively offer their innovative ideas to innovation champions and the innovation group.

The introduction of innovative tools such as Data Raptor and Large Bank Transaction Testing has offered new digital solutions in respect of audit risk and key audit procedures.
 

Fan, Larry

Associate, Audit & Assurance, Deloitte China

With Report Wizard, a digital tool developed by our audit innovation group, the engagement team managed to complete the work in just about 200 hours, twice as fast compared to more than 400 hours in the past. Meanwhile, the engagement team and innovation group have worked closely together in optimizing Report Wizard to support more document types and customization, allowing more engagement teams to benefit from innovative tools. Besides, I also took part in the firm's audit transformation contest and was lucky to be among the first batch of D.Coin prize winners. This is not just a recognition of the efforts we made in innovation, but an encouragement to our quest for innovation.

Growth – A collaborative network that breaks geographical constraints and functional barriers

Medora, Kaizad

Senior Manager, AP A&A Innovation Lead

Our firm operates in diverse geographies cultivating different ideas and approaches to solve our own internal and client issues. Bringing us together harnesses that knowledge and enhances our capabilities – operating as OneAP. Our close-knit innovation group in Asia Pacific function as one team, not because they need to but instead because they want to. This has resulted in less duplication of investment and acceleration of the deployment of awesome products that are applied across the region – and there is more to come. For example, SEA has benefited from learning from China on how they approach RPA in audit; the whole of AP has benefited from AU and JP leadership in driving and improving our analytics capabilities across the region. Innovation plays a very strong part of our strategy here in Asia Pacific. We will have a role to play in defining the audit of the future and will be a major contributor going forward.
 

Lan, Herbert

Director, IDDC, Deloitte China

Deloitte Innovation & Digital Development Center (IDDC) is a platform for building digital innovative products, encompassing cross-regional and cross-functional collaboration in Deloitte China. Combined with professional services capabilities of business functions, the service experience and service models built over the years, and digital innovation techniques including Artificial intelligence, Blockchain, Cloud, Data analytics and Robotics, IDDC makes possible models of digital services including innovation incubation, technology enabling, product R&D and value delivery. In respect of cross-functional collaboration, IDDC offers "three-in-one" support as incubator, enabler, and game changer.

Meanwhile, IDDC seeks to tap into the disruptive impact of technological changes on different disciplines of professional services. By incubating creative ideas to smart applications, IDDC builds commercial solutions with different functions to realize the benefits of technology, achieve digital transformation and maximize value.

Talent is the biggest driver of digital innovation and transformation. At Deloitte, we embrace the spirit of innovation from our founders and make every effort to cultivate our future talent with the best innovation culture. Through seamless collaboration, we develop more audit innovation products to provide differentiated value services to our clients. In the upcoming issues, we will take you to learn more about the applications and values of some of our audit innovation and digital assets. Please stay tuned!

Previous issues

Issue 1: Becoming a KOL!

Issue 2: USD1bn venture — the 3 Ws of audit transformation