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Digital Internal Audit: It’s a journey, not a destination

The road map for IA functions to maximize the benefits of digital investment

As digital has become an essential enabler of strategy, Internal Audit (IA) functions are embarking on a digital journey that aligns with their vision and goals. Here’s an in-depth view of how IA can ride the digital wave to deliver better insights, quality, efficiency, and impact.

As organizations navigate new risk factors and require more from IA, chief audit executives are turning to digital transformation to help close the gaps. It would require leaders to deploy analytics, automation, and other tech solutions to increase efficiency, drive greater insights, decrease errors, and free up resources for value-added work. Integrating and embedding digital assets or enablers (technologies, channels, and ways of working) to transform existing operational processes and increase the value offered to stakeholders isn’t easy. It requires a cultural shift and a mindset of experimentation, innovation, and challenging the status quo. Digital transformation is the journey of IA functions to truly embed digital assets and ways of working into their function in line with their vision and strategy.

Digital Internal Audit: It’s a journey, not a destination

Embarking on the digital journey

Options to collect, curate, and analyze data have never been greater, and now is the time for IA to lay a strong foundation for the future. Business leaders and IA stakeholders increasingly rely on data to support critical decisions. Data enables fact-based decisions that can improve business strategies, operations, and grow the top line. Embracing the power of digital transformation in IA functions is a journey unique to every organization’s goals. However, one thing is common—the way to transformation requires both methods and mindset.

The advantages of digital investment in IA

Investing in digital opportunities can prove transformative for organizations. It enables increased automation, leading to a reduction of manual processes and improved assurance coverage. This investment also stimulates efficiency gains and significant cost savings throughout the audit life cycle. Furthermore, it enhances analytics capabilities across each audit phase, promoting greater insights from centralized data sources. Notably, it also aids in reducing staff turnover in the IA department while improving skillsets and strengthening stakeholder relationships across the organization. Lastly, it bolsters regulatory readiness, ensuring increased preparedness for regulatory responses and decreased regulatory risk. The expansion of digital capabilities throughout the IA function can help reveal outdated business processes and assign technology solutions to remedy them, thereby fostering a robust and resilient organization.

Considerations for IA functions

IA can catalyze positive change by bolstering data-driven decisions, providing insights, and predicting key risks. The digital transformation journey, though time-consuming, can revolutionize the IA function and its value. Successful IA functions commonly address four key elements:

  • Understanding of organizational priorities, both short and long-term
  • Alignment with the technology and data strategy of the enterprise
  • Establishment of a strong vision and communication of its importance
  • Recognition that this is a transformation and not just a project

Deloitte understands how to empower IA through digital

Implementing the right digital solution for your organization can enable your auditors to reach their goals faster and deliver better insights. Deloitte can help you align strategically, find and implement the right solution, and improve continuously.

Three primary enterprise service delivery goals

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Purpose

Digital is an enabler of strategy, not a goal. Understanding your north star or purpose can result in the strategic use of digital to deliver better insights, quality, efficiency, collaboration, and impact.

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Assess

By leveraging Deloitte’s Insight-Driven Organization framework, we can assess the IA team’s current and desired future maturity levels and identify where opportunities for action exist.

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Design

By entrenching data, analysis, and reasoning into IA’s decision-making processes, we turn digital into a core capability while promoting a culture of insight-driven auditing.

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Execute

Strategy can be brought to life through the deployment of digital technologies across the IA life cycle, including risk assessment, planning, fieldwork, reporting, and monitoring.

The Deloitte approach to bringing digital to IA:

Contacts

Geoffrey Kovesdy

Geoffrey Kovesdy

Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory

Geoff has 18 years of experience, where he collaborates with his clients to develop bespoke solutions for their strategic opportunities. This includes, but is not limited to digital transformations, p... More

Michael Schor

Michael Schor

Global Advisory Leader for Bank of America

Michael is a partner in Deloitte & Touche LLP’s Risk & Financial Advisory practice, where he focuses on advising our domestic and international clients on matters of internal controls, including infor... More

Neil White

Neil White

Principal | Deloitte & Touche LLP

Neil runs Deloitte’s Center of Excellence and is globally responsible for Internal Audit Analytics, addressing analytics for risk dash-boarding, continuous controls monitoring, fraud, and forensics an... More

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